Derek Jeter will likely be the smilin’ face of the Miami Marlins indefinitely. He’ll sit behind or just to the side of home plate, wearing Marlins gear and cheering when Giancarlo Stanton hits a home run, unless he’s grousing when they blow a lead in the ninth inning. It’s going to be the oddest danged thing.
The Marlins finally have a chance to be a normal team
The Derek Jeter ownership group has a chance to give Miami what it has deserved for a quarter-century.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
You will admire the restraint when a producer keeps the camera on Jeter’s scowling face for only 27 seconds after that blown save.
There are other rich people who will own more of the Marlins, though, and they’ll all have expectations. They didn’t buy the Marlins for the free gear and designated parking spots. They’ll want to increase the value of the franchise, and the easiest, most enjoyable way to do that is by winning. Every single one of these rich people is somewhere right now, daydreaming about what it’ll be like to be hailed as the hero who turned the Miami Marlins around.
The three previous owners were not hailed as heroes. These include ...
- Wayne Huizenga, who folded up the goodwill that came with a championship team and ate it, returning it to the greater Miami area after it passed through his system. He decided that baseball was on the decline, so he left to focus on industries with more growth potential, like the one that made people leave their homes to borrow VHS cassettes.
- John Henry, who turned in his chance to build a big-market juggernaut for a chance to own an established big-market juggernaut
- Jeffrey Loria, an ambulatory mollusk who reminds me of this Bloom County strip every time I see a picture of him, was someone who seemed to care about the team on one hand, while simultaneously projecting the image of someone who actively, viciously hated baseball and everyone who cared about it on the other.
The bar is low, in other words. What can the Jebter-led ownership group do to build goodwill?
Go full Dodgers
The Dodgers spent eight years under Frank McCourt, who owned a baseball team because he liked to own a baseball team, not because he had any idea how to run a baseball team. When they were purchased for a record amount by Guggenheim Partners, their fans were optimistic, but how much would they really invest back into the team? No one would know until the 2012-13 offseason, it seemed.
Except the new ownership group couldn’t wait, so it traded for Adrian Gonzalez, absorbing the hundreds of millions of dollars owed to Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford for the privilege. This wasn’t just the Dodgers signing a big free agent. This was them doing the equivalent of signing a big free agent and telling the world they could afford to sign two duds at the same time, just as a cost of doing business.
They’ve calmed down since then, but they’re still setting payroll records. No one is wondering where they stand financially anymore.
The Marlins’ group isn’t likely to make a similar in-season splash to prove a point. For one, the Dodgers were obvious contenders in 2012, whereas the Marlins seem likelier to orbit .500 for most of the season. For another, I’m not sure if there’s a player like Gonzalez out there — someone who recently inked a huge deal, is still in his prime, and whose team has collapsed. Zack Greinke ticks a couple of those boxes, but the Gonzalez/Punto trade seemed like a 16-bet parlay that had to fall just right.
They could still go big after the season, though. Johnny Cueto and Jake Arrieta! Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka! Shore up that rotation and prove to the fans that the Marlins are big-market bullies now.
Except, can you think of another fan base in professional sports that would be more skeptical of that kind of display? It would send a message that’s been sent before, and the message is usually followed by, “lol just kidding.” The Marlins spent their way to a championship in 1997, and then they yoinked the rug away. They used the prospects from that fire sale to rebuild the roster, and then they chipped away at it like a small-market team. They bilked the county out of hundreds of millions, and they made a big show of building a competitive roster as a gesture of goodwill, but they didn’t even commit to it for an entire season.
A show of force wouldn’t make Marlins fans come to the ballpark. They’ve seen the shock and awe campaigns before. I’d argue a Gonzalez-type move (or a Buehrle/Reyes/Johnson offseason) would be less effective for Marlins fans than any other fans and would be counterproductive.
Act like they play in the market size they do
Miami isn’t New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, and it’s not that close. That’s the top tier, and there’s no touching those markets.
Those markets are all shared markets, so the gap isn’t as substantial as it seems. Still, it seems more prudent to lump Miami in with the other one-team, second-tier markets. As it happens, there are five teams serving a metropolitan population between 6 million and 7 million. One of them is the Marlins. The other four:
And these give us a hint of what the Marlins could be. The recent history of these teams, in order:
- Spent a healthy amount in the offseason on several different players to reinforce a contending roster
- Have spent in the past on free agents and their own players; operate within constraints, but certainly aren’t handcuffed
- Have spent in the past on free agents and their own players; operate within constraints, but certainly aren’t handcuffed
- In the middle of a rebuilding phase, but likely to light one of the next two offseasons on fire
The Marlins becoming the Rangers or Nationals is the likeliest scenario. They’ll sign their Shin-Shoo Choos and Jayson Werths for too much money and regret it, but they’ll also muscle their way in for the Yu Darvishes and Max Scherzei, which will shape the franchise for years.
In the interim, they’ll keep most of their stars. Do this for a decade, and the trust will come back.
Continue being a weirdo franchise
I can’t fathom how the new owners for the Marlins would pay $1.3 billion for a franchise, with a group that includes one of the most recognizable faces of his generation, only to continue a legacy of clumsy betrayal.
On the other hand, those who ignore history are doomed to stare into the spinning psychedelia of a neon flamingo abyss, as the saying goes, and maybe there’s just something about the Marlins that makes owners lose a few I.Q. points, or at least makes them more oblivious about how baseball teams are supposed to be run.
The quickest way to being a weirdo franchise would be to try some combination of the above two options, failing because free agents are inherently risky, and then deciding the proper baseball/business move would be to start over, like the Phillies did. Hey, no one is begrudging what the Phillies did, right? Look where rebuilding got the Astros! Look where it got the Cubs!
The Marlins don’t have that leeway, though. They aren’t an institution. They’re trying to get where the Astros were, much less the Cubs and the Phillies. They can’t afford to commit to a single hand if it’s going to make them leave the table with a “Well, we tried” attitude. They don’t need to be as austere as the Rays, but they can’t be as wild as the pre-2012 Marlins, either, if the worst-case scenario would be the same.
Most likely, though, the Marlins will be the Nationals, Astros, or Rangers now. They’ll spend to compete. They’ll invest in their prospects. They’ll stumble without rebuilding, struggle without changing the mission statement.
It will take time for the area to realize the team isn’t allergic to stability. There won’t be a splashy move to get everyone excited immediately, at least not for the sake of a splashy move to get everyone excited immediately. They’ll act like their upper-mid-market peers season in and season out. Sometimes it’ll work, and sometimes it won’t.
For Marlins fans, though, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal. They’ve put up with a lot, and even though they’ve been rewarded with two surprise championships over the last two decades, they’d like it very much if they could stop putting up with that much, thank you.
This is the Marlins’ chance to be a normal team, and it’s hard to see how they’ll blow it.
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