The joke is on us: Jeffrey Loria has his stadium and dumps his star players
By DAVID J. NEAL
[email protected]
Shooting down the Dolphin Expressway a couple of weeks ago, I glanced over at Marlins Park. It seemed to be laughing.
I couldn’t exactly determine the type of mirth in those brief few seconds.
Now, as the Marlins deal pitchers Josh Johnson, Mark Buerhle and their best position player, Jose Reyes, to finish a roster cutdown that began at midseason, I can identify it as the sinister belly laugh of a sentient Death Star-like construct.
“My master, Lord Loria, merely dangled a few promises before you to fool you into helping to create me! Now, the mighty tractor beam of my debt will suck the money from your present and future pockets as you slave while I make Lord Loria ever richer and more powerful! BWAAAA-HA-HA-HA!”
Whichever, the joke stays on us.
Marlins fans still pouting over 1997 now have something else to spend 15 years (or, however long it’s going to take to pay off that stadium debt) grumbling about.
Hey, at least Wayne Huizenga bought a World Series title team before breaking it up when he saw the Marlins couldn’t win on the bottom line.
You got a World Series championship after five seasons and spent at least twice that long pouting about the breakup.
That’s just being a bitter ex-spouse.
Pulling plug
The art collector, through his player buyer Larry Beinfest, bought a 69-win team that began disintegrating shortly after Memorial Day and finished 29 games out of first.
Management pulled out the electric carving knife on this turkey in July, trading Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante to eventual American League champion Detroit (where former Marlin Miguel Cabrera was winning the first Triple Crown since the Summer of Love) and Hanley Ramirez to the Dodgers.
Now, be bitter, fans. That is someone who married you for your money.
Johnson, once seen as a longtime franchise ace, never fully recovered from the shoulder and back problems that ended his 2011 season early.
Buerhle wound up the Marlins best pitcher this season, going 13-13 with a 3.74 ERA, best among Marlins starters.
Reyes, the 2011 National League MVP with the Mets, hit .287, had a .347 on-base percentage and stole 40 bases.
Worse fiasco
This is the biggest fiasco season in the Marlins 20 seasons.
Worse than 1994 when all of baseball, management and players, blew up the World Series.
Worse than 1998, the year after the selloff.
At least that year had the memory of a World Series, the weirdness of Mike Piazza as a Marlin for five games as a rest stop between the Dodgers and Mets; and the video of a woman performing the most athletic feat at a Marlins game that season on her guy.
Many issues
This year lacked such entertainment despite the follies that The Franchise never fully mined. The Marlins brass bought Ozzie Guillen’s mind and personality, and were shocked they also bought Guillen’s PR-plummeting potpourri of a mouth. Who knew? Then, after Guillen’s Fidel Castro comments, the Marlins forced Guillen into an apology news conference that embarrassingly echoed similar government-run media sessions in fascist countries.
They bought, then traded, Heath Bell, a closer who couldn’t close a drawer. Their once solid minor-league system got revealed as suffering from a dearth of talent.
With that money, Marlins general manager Larry Bienfest spent poorly.
Bad moves
Earlier Tuesday, I envisioned Bienfest as Charlie Brown in a Peanuts strip from the 1970s. Charlie Brown says to Lucy, “This is the time of year when teams improve themselves with a few shrewd trades.” Lucy says, “Good idea. Why don’t you trade yourself?”
Charlie Brown winds up trading Snoopy to Peppermint Patty’s team for five players. Snoopy guilt trips Charlie Brown into tearing up the deal just as Peppermint Patty shows up to say the five players said they’d quit baseball before playing for Charlie Brown’s team.
Wonder if those Blue Jays would feel that way about the Marlins without the money.
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Fans, players react to another Miami Marlins dismantling
By MANNY NAVARRO
[email protected]
Although it still is awaiting approval by Major League Baseball before it can be made official, a 12-player, blockbuster trade agreed to by the Marlins and Blue Jays didn’t take long to create shock waves throughout the country via Twitter on Tuesday night.
“Huh?” a puzzled Ricky Nolasco posted on his official Twitter account shortly after the news broke around 6:15 p.m. that former teammates Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, Jose Reyes, John Buck and Emilio Bonifacio were being shipped off to Toronto in what essentially is another Marlins fire sale.
“I’m not gonna do whatever [everybody] thinks I’m gonna do and freak out!” Logan Morrison posted on his Twitter account. “Ugh, I need a bath.”
The Marlins, who had an Opening Day salary of $112 million in 2012 unloaded $163.75million in guaranteed contracts to Buck, Buehrle, Johnson and Reyes and avoided having to deal in arbitration with Bonifacio, who earned $2.2 million in 2012, by making Tuesday’s trade with Toronto. Right now, the Marlins could spend less than $20 million to field a big-league team in 2013.
What Miami got in return Tuesday is hardly a recognizable crew of names. Acquired in the deal with Toronto: Cuban-born shortstop Yunel Escobar, 30, who hit just .253 with nine homers and 51 RBI in 145 games in 2012; 22-year-old right-handed pitcher Henderson Alvarez (9-14, 4.85 ERA, 79 Ks, 54 BBs in 31 starts in 2012); backup catcher Jeff Mathis, who hit .218 with eight homers and 27 RBI in 71 games in 2012; and four minor-league prospects (three of the top seven in Toronto’s farm system, according to MLB.com).
“From a pure baseball standpoint, the Marlins did well with this deal. But this trade has a lot more ripples beyond the makeup of the roster,” ESPN’s Buster Olney said of the trade on his Twitter account.
Those ripples figure to be created by fans at the ticket office. The Marlins, who finished 69-93 and in last-place for the second year in a row in the National League East, drew 2,219,444 fans to their new $515 million park this season. That ranked 12th out of 16 teams in the National League. But once the team began shipping away the bulk of its infield just before the trade deadline, numbers began to dwindle.
Angry Marlins fans took to Twitter and local radio airwaves to express their disgust with the trade. It’s hard to blame them.
The 25-man roster hardly resembles the one the team had for Opening Day back in April. The only players still under club control in 2013 who were there for Opening Day in 2012 are Nolasco (set to make $11.5 million), Morrison ($480,000), All-Star right-fielder Giancarlo Stanton ($480,000), pinch-hitter Greg Dobbs ($1.5 million) and relief pitchers Mike Dunn ($480,000), Ryan Webb (arbitration eligible) and Steve Cishek ($480,000).
Stanton, the team’s cornerstone who is under club control through the 2016 season, hardly seemed thrilled by the deal, taking to Twitter to express his anger.
“I’m pissed off!!!” Stanton wrote. “Plain & Simple.”
Owner Jeffrey Loria, who turns 72 next week, wasn’t around when the Marlins introduced Mike Redmond as the club’s new manager at the beginning of the month. But Larry Beinfest, the club’s president of baseball operations, made it pretty clear the day Redmond was hired that the Marlins were looking to get back to their frugal ways.
“We talk about getting back to our ways, we’ve got get back to what we used to do like when we got Cody Ross for a dollar,” Beinfest said. “We got Dan Uggla for $50,000. Miguel Olivo. Wes Helms. We found ways to get it done. I’ll take some of the blame on that.
“We need to find value. We need to rely on our scouts and our people to help us overcome some of these challenges.”
Aside from Stanton in right field, Morrison at first base or left field, catcher Rob Brantly, outfielder Justin Ruggiano and the newly acquired Escobar it’s anyone’s guess how the Marlins plan to fill out the rest of the roster at this point. The starting rotation figures to have some form to it with Nolasco, Nathan Eovaldi, Jacob Turner and the newly acquired Alvarez.
But like everything else with the Marlins, nothing is set in stone.
“Well I’m gonna miss you guys…,” Cishek wrote on his Twitter account Tuesday night.
“Hopefully, our new teammates are as awesome on and off the field as buehrle jj buck boni and Reyes.”
