Blue Jays, Marlins trade swap finalized

The goal of this article is to take an objective look at the Marlins’ decision to rebuild, without getting into the public-relations stuff. Now that we have the luxury of offseason hindsight, we can ask again if the Marlins picked the right time to rebuild.

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Like all baseball writers, I have a splendid talent for being wrong. Hopelessly, fantastically wrong, over and over again. That’s how you’re supposed to write about baseball. You start with stupid and wrong, grab a shovel, and dig down from there. But even considering that, there’s no match for this winner of a column from a year ago.

Barf.

Just want to get this straight ... The Marlins were the highest bidder and he signed with them mostly because of Ozzie Guillen’s steady hand? What a happy coincidence that was!

There’s a part of me that can’t help admiring the Marlins. I hate no-trade clauses. If I’m running a baseball team, I want as few fetters as possible.*

Apparently, the Marlins have been in the baseball news lately, so, not wanting to appear “out of touch” with goings on, here’s something Marlins related.

Marlins carpet tiles

Well, it took six days. But maybe that’s to be expected, when a trade involves a dozen players and the baseball schedule isn’t providing some time-sensitive imperative.

You got that? He carefully reviewed this transaction. Which makes me feel a whole lot better about it.

Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do. After all of the outrage and the name-calling directed toward Jeffrey Loria, there’s a chance that Bud Selig might stop the trade? From Bob Nightengale:

There is precedent here, of course. In 1976, commissioner Bowie Kuhn overturned deals made by Charlie Finley and the A’s, who were selling their best players for cash money.

It’s not as good as past offerings, but the important thing is the transcontinental hate for Jeffrey Loria.

The other important thing is this GIF:

I don’t like to mix politics into my writing too much, but there was a video making the rounds last month that I can’t get out of my head. Chris Matthews is interviewing a throng of people about the upcoming presidential election, and he interviews someone who claims Barack Obama is a communist. What’s a communist? Well, study it out. No, seriously, Matthews asks: What’s a communist? The response: Study it out.

You don’t have to be on the left side of the political spectrum to find that amusing/horrifying. It’s a bizarre response to a request for more information. But after it outlived its five-second Internet half-life, I figured I wouldn’t think of it again.

After the huge Marlins/Jays trade, there was a race to see who could be more disgusted with Jeffrey Loria. This is because Loria is disgusting and frequently leaves people feeling disgusted. But who had the best description of him?

You can find good results for “horrible” and “Jeffrey Loria” on Twitter, and you can get results for “toad” and “Loria”, too. If you want, you can also enter whatever naughty word enters your head and “Loria”. No one is thinking about the poor guy named Dick Loria who just wants to search Twitter to see how people responded to his real estate seminar!

What’s apparently happening to the Miami Marlins right now isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last. It’s pretty rare, though. Sure, there have been a great number of mini-fire sales, and going back for a long, long time. But the full-scale selling off of a team’s highest-salaried stars isn’t something we see very often.

The first big sell-off came after the 1914 season. The Philadelphia Athletics, managed (and owned!) by Connie Mack, had just won their fourth American League pennant in five years. They got swept in the World Series that fall, but had won the other three Fall Classics in which they’d played.

According to Joe Capozzi of the Palm Beach Post, the team drew 2,219,444 fans in its first year at Marlins Park, which ranked 18th in the league and represented the smallest first-year attendance for a ballpark since 2001.

Marlins star outfielder Giancarlo Stanton tweeted, “Alright, I’m pissed off!!!! Plain & Simple.” Ricky Nolasco, the highest-paid Marlin, added, “Huh?.....”.

Head writer Michael Jong thinks the Marlins’ brass panicked:

He anticipates a strong backlash against Marlins’ owner Jeffrey Loria, who made many promises that the new ballpark in Miami would bring new enthusiasm and new success.

Apparently not satisfied with letting college basketball’s 24-hour marathon have the sports spotlight, news of a blockbuster trade in baseball broke Tuesday night: the Miami Marlins, salary-dumping enthusiasts, are reportedly set to send SS Jose Reyes and starting pitchers Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle to the Toronto Blue Jays. But wait, there’s more!

Additionally, Miami will throw in catcher John Buck and utility player Emilio Bonifacio, in exchange for some of the Blue Jays’ top prospects, including shortstops Adeiny Hechavarria and Yunel Escobar, pitchers Henderson Alvarez and Justin Nicolino and outfielder Jake Marisnick.