Walter MIichot/Associated Press - Jeffrey Loria, left,and Marlins President David P. Samson hold a Marlins jersey on Feb. 16, 2002, after Loria purchased the team from John Henry.
Jeffrey Loria, the worst owner in baseball, first tried to enter the big leagues in 1994 with a bid to buy the Baltimore Orioles. Baltimore lucked out. The city got an owner who was more competent, more loyal to the town and rich enough that he wasn’t tempted to turn the franchise into his own personal revenue-sharing ATM. Instead of Loria, Baltimore got Peter Angelos.
That’s how bad Loria is.
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The reason Washington now has the Nationals, the team with the best regular season record in baseball, also is due to Loria as much as any one person. In Montreal, he ruined the Expos. He had help. Montreal didn’t care much about baseball. But, as his three bitter seasons there passed, the shape of something not unlike a plot began to emerge.
The team was so bad and its future so bleak that his partners refused to meet cash calls. Thus, Loria’s original 24 percent stake, reportedly bought for just $12 million, grew to 94 percent by default. By 2002, the Expos were so pathetic that MLB bought the team from Loria for $120 million and then gave him a $38.5 million interest-free loan. Nice deal. What did he do with that $158.5 million? He used it to buy the Marlins from their unhappy owner John Henry. That paved the way for Henry to buy the Boston Red Sox.
Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “old boys’ network.” That’s it. It must be legal because nobody’s in jail, right? But it seems close.
Loria’s former partners sued him and MLB under racketeering statutes, but lost the case in arbitration. MLB sold the Expos, now virtually worthless in Canada, to the Lerners for $420 million, provided the District built a new $640 million park.
It’s not racketeering, but it sure is a racket.
Now we can add Miami to the towns that would like to throw the book at Loria. This week, he completed the ruination of another franchise. The Marlins sleep with the fishes.
On some days, only a brief history lesson such as this one, will suffice to give depth to the disgrace of the day. You cannot understand the devastation of the Marlins, the fleecing of hundreds of millions of dollars from Miami taxpayers for a new park and the crippling of a franchise for many years to come until you grasp the pattern of business depravity of the man behind it.
On Tuesday, the Marlins didn’t just trade away most of the best and most expensive players left on their roster: Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson and others, dumping more than $160 million in salary to Toronto.
Loria and his executives turned their seven-month-old, $600-million, 80-percent-publicly-funded park into a toxic dump where no sane player will choose to play as long as present management has its hands on the throats of the team.
Last winter, as Loria’s Marlins went on what now looks like a fake “good faith” spending binge, some free agents, such as Albert Pujols, were smart enough not to take his money, perhaps because Miami’s “policy” is never to give any free agent a no-trade clause.
That way, a player is always meat-on-the-hoof, mere inventory, as long as a team can find somebody who’ll take his contract — or a portion of it, depending on how much the Marlins have to eat. Now, Reyes, who’s from the Dominican Republic and loved the Hispanic influence in Miami life, is obligated to play at least five seasons in Toronto. The $96 million he’s owed may help. But that’s not enough to heat all of Canada.
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