I don't think you understand my stance on the trades, Plommer.
*or you skimmed the article
I agree with your stance on the trades. I also think there is a major disconnect with Marlin fans and ownership. How Loria does business is why Pujols wouldn't sign with Miami. It also wouldn't surprise me if they fire Guillen at the end of the year and replace with a much cheaper manager.
Two interesting articles on the Marlins today- Joe Sheehan and Forbes:
The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. IV, No. 56
July 25, 2012
In 1997, the Florida Marlins won the World Series. Before the team could leverage that into ticket sales, parking and concession revenue, goodwill and all the other things that accrue to a World Champion, owner Wayne Huizenga forced a fire sale in which he dealt off the entire starting outfleld, the first baseman, two starting pitchers and the closer. The sale was predicated on a lie: that the team had lost money and needed a new taxpayer-funded ballpark to be successful. Subsequent research by Andrew Zimbalist proved that in fact, Huizenga had profited from the team's success, but that the profits had flowed to the team's ballpark -- also owned by Huizenga -- rather than the team. It was the first visible example of how common ownership of teams and their associated entities could enable owners to make money while making their baseball teams seem like financial losers.
Six years later, under new owner Jeffrey Loria, the Florida Marlins once again won the World Series. Before the team could leverage that into ticket sales, parking and concession revenue, goodwill and all the other things that accrue to a World Champion, Loria forced a fire sale, though one not quite as dramatic as the '98 sale. While the sale did not come with the accounting shenanigans of the Huizenga sell-off, it was intended to underline the point that Loria wanted a taxpayer-funded ballpark for his team, and would refuse to raise his payroll even in the wake of a championship. Burnt for the second time in six years, South Florida would subsequently reject the Marlins, eventually turning their games into the worst-attended MLB contests since late-1970s Mets games.
Let's be very clear: the Marlins had done this to themselves. In their first five seasons, they hadn't fallen below tenth in the 14-team National League in attendance. They were fifth twice, once as an expansion team in 1993, and once when they won in 1997. After the fire sale, the Marlins never finished above 13th in the NL in attendance, and rated that highly only in that first post-title season of 1998. From 1999 through 2011, the Marlins finished last or next-to-last in the NL in attendance in every season except one: 2004, when in the year after a title they moved up to 14th. Loria, backed by MLB and its extensive experience in taxpayer shakedowns, insisted the Marlins' failure to bring people to the park was due to the unattractiveness of the park. History shows that the Marlins' failure to bring people to the park is due to what happened in the wake of 1997. The franchise has never recovered from Wayne Huizenga's mendacity.
Against this backdrop, the Marlins' threats worked in the way they always seem to: the politicians circumvented the citizenry and authorized a stadium deal without a public vote. In 2009, Miami City and Miami-Dade County commissioners approved a play for a $525 million stadium that would be financed almost wholly by public money. A team whose attendance, in a large media market, was embarrassing, and which had twice torn apart championship rosters in what can only be described as tantrums, accompanying one with a $43 million lie, had gotten what it wanted: a taxpayer-funded ATM.
With a license to print money in hand, Loria spent, but just a little bit. Remember that last winter, the team was less than a year removed from being openly scolded by the MLBPA for being a revenue-sharing recipient but not spending that money on major-league players. A year prior to that, the team had responded to a first round of criticism by signing Josh Johnson to a heavily-backloaded four-year contract. The Marlins, as ever, were spending money only under duress. So when Loria went out and signed Heath Bell to a three-year deal, and Mark Buehrle to a four-year deal and Jose Reyes to a six-year deal, it was hard to not notice one common theme: the contracts were all heavily backloaded. Loria was agreeing to contracts worth $191 million in total, but he wasn't making commitments, adding just $22 million to the 2012 payroll and leaving the rest to the future. He was raising the 2012 payroll figure for revenue-sharing purposes (a number based on average annual value), but he wasn't raising the 2012 payroll substantially.
The Marlins had done this before. As I wrote in the offseason, the Marlins under both Huizenga and Loria had signed free agents and subsequently traded them, garnering the positive publicity of the press conference and then discarding most of the financial obligation. With the new stadium, however, things were supposed to be different. The Marlins had spent 15 years insisting that that ownership or bad baseball decisions weren't the problem, but that it was that they had to play in a football stadium in a bad location.
The 2012 Miami Marlins, playing in Marlins Park, so new that there's still bubble wrap over some sections, are 12th in the National League in attendance. Not four months into the park's active life, the Marlins have once again authorized a fire sale. On Monday, the team traded its starting second baseman and #2 starter. Last night, under cover of darkness, it traded its starting third baseman -- the face of the franchise for the last six years. The deals save the Marlins approximately $10 million in 2012 and get the team out from under $31.5 million owed to Hanley Ramirez in 2013 and 2014. Rumors persist that the team is going to trade Johnson, Bell and anyone else making more than $4.75 an hour…having banked the season-ticket money and four months of game-day revenues.
Isn't it time to call a spade a spade? The Marlins ruined their relationship with the city of Miami in the '97-'98 offseason, and they did so with the implicit blessing of Major League Baseball. They won a championship despite themselves six years later and did the same thing, with the implicit blessing of Major League Baseball. In 2008, MLB president and COO Bob DuPuy went to Miami -- which had been among the worst markets for baseball over the previous decade -- and threatened the city with the loss of its team if it did not hand over the keys to the vault. Only when the MLBPA pointed out that recent Marlins' payrolls barely exceeded the revenue-sharing money they received did MLB exert some influence on the business practices of the team.
I'm perfectly willing to blame Jeffrey Loria, and Wayne Huizenga before him, for what has happened and is happening in Miami. Huizenga lied and Loria stopped short it, all while severing the connection between the team and the community, stripping the relationship to its core components: "you give us money and shut the **** up about it." When you take a step back, though, what has happened in Miami is the natural end to 20 years of MLB's relationship with cities in the United States and Canada. Under Bud Selig, MLB has fundamentally changed the relationship from "team and city" to "franchise and revenue sources". It's an incredibly cynical approach and one that has, among other effects, damaged the way fans and players relate, because the players are the accessible face of the process and MLB has done a remarkable job convincing fans that the players are the reason their beer costs $9.
What has happened in Miami is no different than what happened in San Diego, what happened in Milwaukee, what happened in Seattle, what happened twice in New York. MLB put its game plan into place to get politicians to sign over tax revenue -- often by increasingly usurious taxes on visitors, the easiest kind to sell, but sometimes on sales taxes tapping the whole community -- to finance a ballpark from which the team would keep the revenue. The details vary, but when you do this enough times, when you tell a community that it's only as relevant as the tax dollars it will give you, you become little more than a guy with a gun and a mask. Eventually, someone comes along who plays the game with even more viciousness than you do, with even less concern for how things look, with no regard for the endgame, and takes your plan that one step further and shoots the hostage.
MLB created Jeffrey Loria. MLB created this latest fire sale by not stopping the first two. MLB set all of this in motion by turning its business model from putting winning teams on the field and making money to turning the United States upside down and shaking money out of it. Loria isn't an anomaly. He's the natural evolution of the modern MLB owner.
We're not done yet, you know. What is a new ballpark, to Bud Selig, but a moment before you need another new ballpark? The A's situation has to be rectified, and then the MLB will turn to the City and County of Los Angeles for a billion dollars so that the Dodgers' new owners can justify their investment, and maybe when that happens, the Angels notice that despite the renovations, they're now playing in the oldest non-classic ballpark in the majors, and soon after that, well, the Skydome and US Cellular and Camden Yards will all be turning 30, and my god, how can you play 81 games a year in a ballpark that old?
When does it end? I don't know, but every city that's going to find itself at the point of Bud Selig's bayonet in the next few years should take a good, hard look at the 2012 Marlins and understand that their money buys them absolutely nothing. To look at Anibal Sanchez in a Tigers uniform, and Hanley Ramirez in Dodger blue, is to realize that the promise of exchanging taxpayer dollars for a watchable baseball team has always been a lie.
