by the New York Times

The high-priced asset up for auction was not a Picasso but a baseball team that has rarely been described as artful — or very successful.

The auction house was a bankruptcy courtroom that lacked eager suitors holding up numbered paddles or a fast-talking auctioneer banging a bid-ending gavel.

But in a contentious, delay-filled auction that barely resembled a bidding war, the Texas Rangers were sold early Thursday morning for $385 million to a group led by Nolan Ryan, the team’s president, and Chuck Greenberg, a lawyer who owns two minor-league teams.

It took nearly 16 hours.

Ryan, the Hall of Fame pitcher, and Greenberg defeated a partnership formed within the past week by Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Jim Crane, a Houston investor who made a losing play for the Astros in 2008.

The winning bid represents only its cash portion which, when added to $208 million in assumed liabilities, and reduced by $3 million in miscellaneous deductions, puts the final pricetag at $590 million. “It’s a relief just to know that we got it done,” Ryan said. Regarding Cuban and Crane, he added: “They did their due diligence, so I knew they were serious about it.”

Cuban said afterward: “We set the limit at where we would go and we hit the limit.” Throughout the hearing, he was a quiet presence, wearing an 11-year-old blue suit instead of his usual sideline uniform of a T shirt and jeans.

The final Cuban-Crane bid was valued at $581.2 million after deductions that added up to nearly $17 million.

The Rangers sale became inevitable when Hicks defaulted on $525 million in debt on his sports holding company in March 2009. The action left creditors unhappy, knowing that they might never recover all their losses. Hicks put the team up for sale late last year and made a deal with Ryan and Greenberg. Finally, on May 24th, the team filed for bankruptcy hoping that it would accelerate the sale to Ryan and Greenberg.

The sale represents a triumph for Major League Baseball, which has staunchly backed the Ryan-Greenberg partnership against Hicks’s lenders.

M.L.B. took over the sale process from Hicks earlier this year and has provided his first-place team with $40 million in loans.

Sal Galatioto, whose Galatioto Sports Partners is a secondary creditor to Hicks, called the $590 million pricetag an “outstanding outcome” but said that lenders will not recoup their investment in Hicks’s company through the sale proceeds “This has been a long way to go for full recovery and now other assets have to be sold,” he said.

The auction was supposed to begin at 9 a.m., central time, but did not start until six hours later. At that point, the Cuban-Crane offer of $318 million was selected by Hicks and the court-appointed chief restructuring officer as what is known in bankruptcy parlance as the “best and highest” bid, above Greenberg and Ryan’s $306.7 million.

Moments later, Thomas Lauria, a lawyer for Greenberg and Ryan, told Judge Russell F. Nelms that the Cuban-Crane offer was defective and said he would need as much as 12 hours to counter it. Nelms asked him to report back in an hour. He didn’t.

Clifton Jessup, a lawyer for Cuban and Crane, scorned Greenberg and Ryan for needless delays in a process designed to advance with new bids every 20 to 30 minutes.

During a recess, Greenberg accused Cuban and Crane of not showing his team their original or revised bid, a maneuver that, if successful, would “kill our financing.”

His group’s financing commitments end on Aug. 12, the date that M.L.B owners plan to vote on its approval. The team needs 23 of the owners’ 30 votes to be approved.

Had Cuban and Crane won, approving them would have taken months.

More than two hours after the first bid came an all-too-brie, flurry.First, a $2 million increase from Greenberg and Ryan to $320 million. Then, a $15 million leap to $335 million from Cuban and Crane.

Over the next three hours, the bidders and other parties involved caucused inside their designated offices to analyze their next steps and assess how to determine the real value of the Cuban-Crane bid if it took up to a year for baseball owners to approve it.

Shortly after 9, Lauria vigorously protested the determination by Snyder’s counsel that the bids were tied, asserting that Snyder had told him he was deeply discounting the Cuban-Crane bid so that the Greenberg-Ryan bid as substantially higher. He requested that the auction stop until D. Michael Lynn, the judge in charge of the case, could rule.

“We feel the process is unfair,” he said, after criticizing the financial and organizational underpinnings of the Cuban-Crane bid.

He added: “This is not an auction. An auction has rules.”

He also attacked elements of Cuban and Crane’s bid financing, his working capital and his organizational structure. (Cuban shrugged and smirked at the last criticism.) Lauria also estimated that the Cuban-Crane bid had only a 50-50 chance of being approved while saying that his clients’ bid was 90 to 95 percent certain

Nelms reserved Lauria’s objections and told Cuban and Crane to bid again.

Up they went to $355 million and beyond, in fits and starts, until Jessup stepped to the courtroom lectern at 12:45 a.m. central time and announced that Cuban and Crane were dropping out.

The last time a baseball team was auctioned out of bankruptcy court was 1993 when Baltimore Orioles principal owner Eli Jacobs was deeply in debt. In a relatively brief auction, two formerly separate bidders, Peter Angelos and William O. DeWitt Jr, teamed up to buy the team for $173 million. The losing bidder was Jeffery Loria, who would eventually buy the Montreal Expos. He now owns the Florida Marlins.