WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Kind of figured it was going to be Derek Jeter all along, right?
Money men of all types have lined up to buy Jeffrey Loria's Miami Marlins over these many months.
Jeb Bush was on the hunt, too, as part of a couple different groups, and so was Tagg Romney, son of Mitt.
Among all the other former players (Tom Glavine, Dave Stewart, etc.) and celebrities (Pitbull, etc.) and garden-variety millionaires and billionaires who wanted in on this, businessman Jorge Mas has the deepest Miami roots, and I still won't be convinced that he is not included until the closing papers show up without his name on them somewhere.
Bottom line, though, Loria wasn't going to sell his major league franchise to any consortium that didn't consort with Jeter first.
It's all part of the Yankeefication of the Marlins, an ongoing Loria goal.
As a boy growing up in New York, Loria loved the Yankees. The first baseball team he owned, the minor-league Oklahoma City 89ers, featured former Yankees star and Yankees broadcaster Bobby Murcer as a minority partner and community pitch man. Loria eventually bought a slice of the New York Yankees, too, and still owned Yankees season tickets in 2003, the year that his Marlins upset the Bronx Bombers in the World Series.
It goes on, the perpetual pinstriping.
Loria hired Joe Girardi, a former Yankee catcher who caught his eye, to manage the Marlins in 2006. That didn't last long, but for the past two years the team has been managed by Don Mattingly, a former Yankees captain.
Handing the baseball and business operations of the franchise to Jeter now isn't just the natural move. It's the only way this story could have ended for Loria, who as owner of the Montreal Expos wanted Jeter to play for him nearly 20 years ago. A Newsday story earlier this year told how Loria's general manager at the time, Jim Beattie, was instructed to try for a trade with the Yankees, using Vladimir Guerrero as bait. No deal.
Well, now a deal is being made, pending the approval of major league owners, that would make Jeter and supposedly Mattingly the two public faces of the Marlins starting next season. Unless you're a transplanted Red Sox fan, or simply never want to agree with Loria on anything, that's got to sound pretty good.
Jeter certainly seems like a trustworthy fellow. He's never done anything to embarrass himself or make the customers hate him. Quite the opposite. This looks like an obvious upgrade, so why am I still wary?
Could be because Bruce Sherman, the retired businessman who will put up the largest chunk of the $1.2 billion purchase price, is so unknown to us. His first instinct might be to move Giancarlo Stanton's supernatural salary off the books, just crunching the numbers. There's just no telling how much more money he is willing to spend on top of what already is being committed, which translates to the second-highest sales price for a major league franchise since the Los Angeles Dodgers went for $2 billion in 2012.
Or it could be that Jeter's track record as a baseball executive also is a total blank. Michael Jordan, another of the 16 investors with this group, could tell Jeter about the difference between dominating a sport athletically and operating a franchise efficiently.
Maybe it's the sheer number of investors, a reason to argue over every issue.
More than anything, though, there is skepticism built into this baseball market about the true commitment of any owner to work through the pain of making the Marlins a winner.
Wayne Huizenga owned the Marlins for the team's first six seasons but his first love was the Miami Dolphins. He quit on baseball even after winning a World Series.
John Henry bought the Marlins after failing in bids to purchase other franchises in baseball and basketball and hockey. He resisted spending money on a new stadium for the Marlins but jumped at the chance to buy the high-priced and high-profile Red Sox.
Then there is Loria, who is 100 games below .500 in 16 seasons as the Marlins' owner and soon will leave with a huge profit on the whole transaction. Consider it a consolation prize.
Owning the Yankees, an American classic, would have been the real jackpot but Loria had to get into the game any way he could.
Here's hoping that Jeter and the Marlins' new bankrollers aren't trying to climb the ladder in the same way, with this struggling franchise in Miami as the bottom rung.
Sports on 08/16/2017