It’s hard not to snicker at the tragicomic demise of the Los Angeles Dodgers under the “stewardship” of former Boston developer Frank McCourt and his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Jamie.

The Dodgers, one of Major League Baseball’s crown jewels, has filed for bankruptcy, thanks in large part to a lavish spending spree financed by the once proud, but now reeling, Dodgers empire.

But don’t laugh too hard. Instead of mild-mannered investment genius John Henry at the helm of our beloved Red Sox, we instead could have McCourt battling to keep control of a bankrupt team saddled with a bloated new ballpark.

“We had a blast bidding on the Red Sox,” McCourt told a Los Angeles newspaper the day he took control of the Dodgers in 2004.

In fact, McCourt probably came closer than anyone thought to buying the Red Sox when the team was for sale in 2001, though no one realized at the time.

‘Ballpark Frank’

Because he owned all those South Boston surface parking lots across from the Moakley courthouse, McCourt was derided as a glorified parking lot attendant – albeit a very wealthy one.

So when he emerged as a bidder for the Sox – pushing a typically grandiose, McCourtian scheme to build the team a new harborside ballpark on his Seaport parking lots – McCourt found himself dismissed yet again as a pretender in seek of attention and headlines.

But it’s clear, in hindsight, that McCourt had just enough assets – both in raw land and money in the bank – to be dangerous.

In 2004, just three years later, McCourt cashed in all that waterfront land and all that money in the bank to buy the Dodgers in a $430 million deal involving Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which for a time wound up owning a big piece of Boston’s waterfront.

If McCourt had succeeded in his pursuit of his first love, the Sox, he might not only have managed to wreck the team, but a chunk of Boston’s waterfront as well.

McCourt’s vision for the Sox was simply one grand – and fatally flawed – real estate development scheme.

McCourt spent countless hours showing off glossy ballpark renderings at community meetings in South Boston in a bid to shore up support in the politically powerful neighborhood. The Boston Herald even took to dubbing him “Ballpark Frank” in headlines.

And had McCourt managed to hire the right political fixers and build that new Sox ballpark on the waterfront, we may very well be looking at a much different franchise today.

Major league teams across the country went to town building giant new stadiums in the 1990s and early 2000s, often to discover they couldn’t sell all the seats.

Ironically, today’s revamped Fenway Park, which McCourt and many others wanted to tear down, has become the league model, a cash cow in which a limited number of seats keeps ticket prices high and fans competing for spots.

Same Story, Different Town

Fortunately, instead of taking over the Sox, Frank and Jamie went to L.A., where they committed the same mistakes all over again, but on a bigger stage.

McCourt proposed building a football stadium on land he controlled near Dodgers stadium, a move that undercut delicate talks then being undertaken by Los Angeles officials.

It had to do wonders for McCourt’s relationship with officials in his new hometown, but things got immeasurably rockier over time.

McCourt and his wife begin divorce proceedings last fall, kicking off an acrimonious court battle that resulted in revelations of a lavish lifestyle on the Dodgers’ dime. Fresh off the plane from Boston, the McCourts blew $70 million on four homes – two near the Playboy Mansion and two in Malibu.

And that was just for starters. The McCourts managed to blow $10,000 a month on a hair stylist, $225,000 a month on a corporate jet and $14 million to replace tennis courts with an Olympic-sized pool.

By this spring, Frank McCourt, his marriage in tatters, was scrambling to renew the Dodgers’ media deal with Fox – all in a desperate bid for cash to make payroll.

Finally fed up, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig stepped in and appointed a veteran MLB owner to monitor the Dodgers finances.

Last week, McCourt played his cards, putting the Dodgers under bankruptcy court protection. That, in turn, could help fend off an expected bid by the league to take over the ailing franchise.

So as you snicker or shake your head at ongoing news reports of the melodrama, be grateful it’s the Dodgers – and not the Sox – caught up in the McCourt meltdown.