The deadline for groups to submit initial bids to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers passed on Monday with just two confirmed bids, according to ESPN.com.

Currently, there are two confirmed bids, according to ESPN:

• A group headed by Beverly Hills Sports Council Founder Dennis Gilbert
• Joshua Macciello, CEO of ArmItal Sports Inc.

A source told ESPN that the deadline is not a major one, as groups can still bid later on in the process; additionally, according to ESPN, original bids are not set in stone, either. Now that the deadline has passed, the process for selecting a team can become more competitive as The Blackstone Group, the investment firm handling the sale, weeds out bids that are not high enough.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt must sell the team by April 30. There were expected to be around 20 bids for the team, and there could be more confirmed bids later on, according to ESPN.

Update (10:52 p.m.) - Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times reports that the number of total bids is over 10:

#Dodgers bids confirmed: Cuban, Magic, O'Malley, Gilbert, Cohen, Caruso/Torre, Gold/Disney. Total bids: "More than 10."

—
Bill Shaikin (@BillShaikin) January 24, 2012

One of the major debits hanging over the Los Angeles Dodgers, as the team awaits a court-supervised bankruptcy sale, is the lawsuit brought by the family of Bryan Stow. Stow was severely beaten at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day and spent several months in a coma as a result; his family is seeking damages from current owner Frank McCourt and the Dodgers organization.

Last week, a lawyer for McCourt and the Dodgers indicated that Stow himself would likely bear some of the responsibility for the incident, but Stow’s attorney, Tom Girardi, takes a different view, according to Ramona Shelburne of ESPNLosAngeles.com: Girardi believes that the Dodgers — and, by extension, whomever buys the team — will be responsible for a substantial sum of money.  And he believes that the uncertainty surrounding that number might adversely affect the team’s chances of being sold.  As a result, Girardi has suggested that MLB reach a “reasonable” settlement with the Stow family.

“It’ll still be a lot of money because reasonable for incidents like this is a lot of money,” Girardi said according to Shelburne. “But we’d work out a reasonable resolution and I think the family would then even cut a commercial for them, saying ‘Come back to Dodger Stadium, it’s safe, they (the new owners) have cured the problem, they were fair to the family.”

The Wall Street Journal believes the eventual sale price for the Dodgers will exceed the $845 million the Chicago Cubs merited in 2009.