Mike Ozanian of Forbes brings the potentially awesome news that the Los Angeles Dodgers ownership bidders want the parking lots as part of the deal.

The five remaining groups bidding for Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers want the roughly 130 acres of land Dodger Stadium’s parking lots sit on to be included with their current offers for the team. The current bids for the Dodgers range from $1.3 billion to $1.6 billion.

According to a high-ranking baseball executive familiar with the bids who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the potential owners do not simply want the right to lease the parking lots at Dodger Stadium from team owner Frank McCourt, they want outright ownership of the land. The Dodgers would not comment but in the past have said on several occasions that the parking lots were not part of the auction.

Talk about an outstanding turn of events.

I hope the executive in question is correct, as this report is in contrast to everything that has been speculated before.

To us fans, it represents a major issue.

Regardless of which group wins the bid, I think not having any association left with Frank McCourt will get fans back into the stadium, just on the basis that we (the fans) would be totally done with that scumbag.

Dodger fans get criticized a lot for a lot of dumb stuff, but we can always be relied on to show up in droves unless your ownership gets boycotted by fans, so cutting ties with the man who somehow managed to make fans angry enough to not show up is probably the best move going forward.

After yesterday’s news that Alan Casden was out of the ownership bidding war, Mike Ozanian of Forbes revealed that Leo Hindery was eliminated as well.

A person familiar with the meetings held today between the seven groups remaining in the bidding for Frank McCourt’s Dodgers and Major League Baseball said the league’s owners were impressed with offers from the following parties: billionaire hedge fund titan Steve Cohenand agent Art Tellem; Magic Johnson and Stan Kasten; billionaire St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke; Memphis Grizzlies billionaire owner Michael Heisley and investor Tony Ressler and Stanley Gold, chief executive officer of Shamrock Holdings, the investment company of the family of the late Roy Disney.

The highest bid was $1.6 billion, from former Los Angeles Lakers great Johnson and former baseball executive Kasten, whose purchase would be partially financed by private equity. But the owners were extremely impressed with the make up of Cohen’s bid, according to my source, which was $1.4 billion but included an astounding $900 million of equity. “There were five strong bids,” said the source, who did not have permission to speak of the negotiations publicly. The lowest bid from the five groups was $1.3 billion.

All the bids included the lease to the parking lots for Dodger Stadium, which would still be owned by McCourt.

MLB was not impressed with the structure of the bid by the group led Leo Hindery, managing partner of the private equity firm InterMedia Partners and former chief executive officer of the YES Network…

To be honest, I’m not sure how much credibility to give anybody but Bill Shaikin in this process, so take it with a grain of salt, but it appears the bidders are slowly being whittled down to everybody’s assumed three favorites.

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Anyway, two things:

1) That’s two sources (maybe the same person, but confirmation, regardless) that believe Steven Cohen is the favorite.

2) The reality appears to be that Frank McCourt is keeping his damn parking lots.