McCourt, a Boston real estate developer, has burdened the team with more than $400 million in debt and been embroiled in an ugly and lengthy legal fight with his wife, Jamie, over the terms of their divorce. Earlier this month, a San Francisco Giants fan was severely beaten in a parking lot at Dodger Stadium in an incident that McCourt conceded exposed a lack of adequate security at the ballpark.

This is the third time in about a year that Selig has inserted himself in the operations of a team. Last year, he accelerated the sale of the Texas Rangers, taking the team out of the hands of Thomas O. Hicks, who had defaulted on bank loans and was out of compliance with baseball’s debt rule. Selig agreed to lend the team about $40 million and guided it to a preferred group of buyers that included the Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan.

And last November, Selig agreed to lend $25 million to the Mets, whose owners are trying to attract a minority investor in an effort to raise $200 million. The Mets’ owners are also fighting a $1 billion lawsuit filed against them in federal bankruptcy court by the trustee for the victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud.

The Dodgers — so stable an organization that the O’Malley family owned them for 47 years until 1998 — were once a jewel of Major League Baseball, with stars like Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese and Sandy Koufax, and Mike Piazza, Orel Hershiser, Steve Garvey and Kirk Gibson in later years.

But the two people with knowledge of Selig’s thinking said he has decided that McCourt has badly damaged the value and reputation of the Dodgers while being concerned only with his own profits and perks. The two people would not be identified because they had not been authorized to speak publicly about the commissioner’s possible plan of action.