The Handy-Dandy Guide to Jeffrey Loria's Letter To (Both) Marlins Fans

This is Jeffty Loria's idea of what heaven looks like

Jeffrey Loria is probably not the worst owner in professional sports history. He lacks, for example, the heady taint of slumlording racism that lingers around Donald Sterling. He's not dumb enough to bet on his own team, like jocksniffing gambler and pilings magnate William D. Cox. He hasn't actively engaged in the sort of wholesale criminal behavior of a Harold Ballard, and he's blessedly absent Marge Schott's fetishes for on-field St. Bernards and Nazi memorabilia.

Also, he's probably never buried a dead hooker in the Everglades.

That's about all the good stuff you can say about him. On the other hand, he actively conspired to destroy baseball in Montreal, hung the cash-strapped Miami municipality on the hook for well over a billion dollars in bond payments for his art nouveau fishtank of a ballpark, shoveled revenue-sharing cash intended to make the team competitive into his pockets with both hands, and repeatedly and cynically dismantled teams after they'd served their PR purposes. He's petulant, vindictive, thin-skinned, petty, and obnoxiously smirky, and I don't care how many awards that stadium wins from People Who Just Happen To Be Friends Of Jeffty Loria, it still looks like the long-lost Jemm And The Holograms stadium playset.

Believe it or not, though, people in South Florida have noticed. They've noticed to the point where they're writing snarky blog posts and not showing up to buy tickets. And that inspired Jeffty, who acts like he is perpetually five, to write a long, chest-thumping screed defending the royal screwing he gave both the region and the fans, and pay to have it run in one of the local papers.

Here, now, is Sportsthodoxy's take on what he said:

What Loria Said:
It’s no secret that last season was not our best — actually it was one of our worst. In large part, our performance on the field stunk and something needed to be done.
What Loria Meant:
"Losing bothers me a lot less when it's cheap."

The Stanton Rumors

For a team that's not talking about trading Giancarlo Stanton, the Marlins sure are talking to a lot of teams about Giancarlo Stanton. As of today you can add the Padres to the list, with the San Diego front office no doubt entranced by the idea of adding someone to their lineup who can hit it out of Yosemite, never mind Petco.
To even the casual observer, this makes no sense. The stated goal of the Marlins' offensive salary dump was to load up on prospects to build another contending team; Stanton would still be under team control when those prospects (hopefully) matured. He's locked in, he's relatively inexpensive, he's a transcendent talent, and he's the only thing on that team worth watching now that the Smeagol-like Jeffrey Loria has quick-kicked on all of his free agent signings and muzzled Logan Morrison's Twitter account. To trade him now for prospects would be to punt the 2013 season; to trade him now for major league talent would no doubt add unacceptably to the payroll Loria's worked so very hard to flense. (And that's leaving aside the near-impossibility of getting back an equivalent package of talent and youth).
Hell, even if Loria's now looking to sell - having slashed payroll and paid himself nicely - trading a marketable superstar like Stanton would only make the team less appealing as a purchase target.
Which leaves only one possibility: spite. Stanton was visibly and publicly upset when half his locker room got traded out from under him. Maybe this is Loria's way of showing Stanton - and the fans, who dared criticize the Great Man when his transparent swindle of the taxpayers of Miami became apparent - who's boss. Don't like it, suckers? Tough. You're already on the hook for the stadium, even if the guys running out to play in it would lose a seven game series to the '78 Expos - and those guys are all in their sixties. Don't like it, Stanton? Get ready for endless months, if not years, of being jerked around, of having no stability and being the subject of constant speculation.
And that, I think, rings the most true. The Marlins aren't going to trade Giancarlo Stanton, not for a good long while yet. But they are going to jerk him around, to dangle him in rumors hither and yon, to punish him for daring to disagree with the Great And Powerful Oz. It seems entirely in character, and entirely detached from the ostensible purpose of a baseball team, which is to say winning games.
But this is Loria, and we already know how all his stories end. With him getting what he wants, with others ponying up for the privilege of getting screwed by this schnook, and with good players on the next train out of town. It's just too bad for Stanton that his train won't be coming until Loria decides he's learned his lesson.

All of Jeffrey Loria's Risks

So the Marlins have traded their two best starters, their All-Star shortstop, their super-utility guy, and their catcher (who, to be fair, offers slightly less value than a used La-Z-Boy recliner but makes a lot of money) to Toronto for some prospects, some kids, and a no-hit shortstop who's yakked his way out of two of the most laid-back situations in the majors (with a side of homophobic eyeblack). With this move, the Marlins have dropped their payroll to about $16M, or as we like to call it, "Ruben Amaro Jr's Idea of a Bargain Starting Pitcher" a year after opening a publicly funded ballpark that cost taxpayers such an obscene amount of money that I can't even type it. (Yes, I know it's supposed to be paid for by taxes on tourists. Except, of course, it never quite works like that - check out the Florida General Fund shenanigans and you'll get the idea).
Now, it is vaguely - vaguely defensible to say that the Marlins realized they weren't going to win anything with their current core, and shipped it off for good pieces. Which would be reasonable if A)they had given said core more than about half a season together B)they hadn't spent like drunken sailors at last year's winter meetings, swearing up and down that this time they really were going to put a competitive team on the field and they weren't backloading the contracts they were handing out so they could ditch the Heath Bells of the world before they got expensive C)they got back anything like a reasonable approximation of talent for all the talent they were shipping away and D)they hadn't pulled this crap multiple times before. No, to even the least cynical eyes out there (which excludes Jon Heyman), this is an obvious cash grab, a cynical rollback of the people Gollum-like team owner Jeffrey Loria used to soak his business partners and his municipality for giant gobs of filthy lucre the second it was possible for him to do so. (This article at Fangraphs lays out nicely how Loria got caught with his hand in the revenue-sharing cookie jar, how he was under the gun for three years, and how he went berserk with the sell-off as soon as the heat was off)
Smarter people than me have been all over the business aspects of this (starting with the estimable Maury Brown, here) and precisely how this whole scenario (back-loaded contracts, anyone? No no-trade clauses?) was always designed to funnel cash away from the product on the field. And that's really what this comes down to, right? Pulling money away from the product on the field - the team, the thing people are theoretically coming to see, the business that this turkey is supposedly engaged in - and into personal revenue. And you can spare me the arguments of "well, they weren't winning with those guys, might as well try to win without them" - when you've got most of the pieces in place, you add the missing one or two, you don't tear the whole thing down instantly. Last year's Marlins were basically a couple of bullpen arms and a few health breaks away from being beasts; they were not the hapless train wreck (except in the dugout) that Loria apologists are describing. No, the team was always an excuse, and that's all.
I'm sure there are folks out there applauding the move from a strictly business sense. I mean, hey, you have to respect the business acumen that turns so little personal investment into so much personal profit, right? Cheers to Loria for using baseball to make money, and why should we hate the guy for being successful.
Except, of course, it's not that clean. Yes, he grabbed an immense profit. Good for him. But to do so, he damaged the business models of his industry and his partners. He damaged the brand of baseball - the notion that the hometown nine is actually trying to win, which is at the core of the game's appeal. He salted the earth of what should be one of the most baseball-friendly markets in America by putting it on the hook for $2.4B in stadium costs while failing to deliver on any of the promises that came with the project, and he alienated the fan base - the customers - with his blatant disregard for the on-the-field product. He took $300M of his partners' money and redirected it to himself. He altered the competitive balance of the game - NL owners are by all accounts pissed that the other NL East teams get extra games against a AAA squad next year. All of this speaks to immense damage to the long-term prospects of the business, weighed against a short-term cash grab. So no, it's not good business, it's just a case of gimme now and damn the torpedoes, and screw the rest of you in the process.
And I read this, and I think of, of all things, hockey, and the NHL lockout. I think about the owners there demanding a unilateral rollback of all the stuff they agreed to last go round. I think about all the apologists who claim that the owners should be getting All The Monies because they take All The Risks. And I think about an owner in Miami, who got the city to pay for his stadium, who got his business partners to pay him $300M to stay in business, who deliberately ran his franchise into the ground for a cynical bout of profit-taking, and who will make another enormous profit once the league finally gins up the courage to make him sell. And I wonder, what risk, exactly, did he take?