If you're a Marlins fan, you're down to one hope this season:
That Rob Manfred knows what he's doing.
The bullpen stinks. The starting staff went from mediocre to injured. The hitters showed up seven weeks into a sunken season. The franchise remains on a treadmill to nowhere.
So, really, your final prayer is Manfred uses the full power of his commissioner's office to deliver the best owner and save this market in a manner his predecessor, Bud Selig, never did.
Selig took care of the Boston Red Sox and Washington Nationals at the expense of the Marlins in a years-ago decision that still reverberates.
You maybe remember the ownership shuffle. John Henry moved from owning the Marlins to buying the Red Sox. Jeffrey Loria surrendered the Montreal Expos so baseball could get a fat expansion fee from a deep-pockets owner in Washington.
For that, Selig gave Loria the Marlins. And, yes, that's the proper verb. And, yes, baseball still is paying for that in this market.
Loria was in a bubbly mood at a dinner a while back, according to someone in attendance, because a piece of art he bought for $5 million had sold for $30 million.
That doesn't come close to the economic multiplier he's done with baseball. It's financial genius, really. His original stake in the Expos was $18 million. He's about to fetch $1.3 billion, give or take a hundred million for involved costs. You do the math.
All that would be fine and dandy and irrelevant to what you should care about except for the condition Loria leaves this market. Which is disastrous. The team is bad (and, let's be fair, the Jose Fernandez Factor looms over games like Banquo's ghost). The franchise is moribund.
The new ballpark hasn't helped. The relationship with fans, never good, remains so low that the Marlins drew national attention for having such a paltry crowd at Wednesday's matinee.
While the attendance was small, it wasn't the lowest in Marlins history. That was for a bad-weather September game in 1999 where Henry walked around the park and invited everyone down to front-row seats.
"I counted 91 people in the stands and I think eight of them were scouts," Henry said.
Maybe South Florida doesn't have enough fans to support baseball. That's a legitimate theory by now. But the commissioner's office has to give this market a chance. This is why this franchise's sale is so important.
You know the latest news: Jeb Bush is out as potential owner. The working idea is that Bush's ex-partner, Derek Jeter, received extra time to re-assemble investors, underlining he's the preferred option of Loria.
You know Tagg Romney is out there with a bid, too. His group just reportedly brought in good guy and good ex-Marlin Al Leiter. But at some point Romney could look at Jeter's preferred-nation status and say, "Here's my deadline. I'm gone after that."
Loria wants the highest price for this sale. As he should. But the highest price doesn't always win, as the 2012 sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers showed.
Manfred has to find the best owner for this market. Maybe it's the group offering the most money. Maybe it's Jeter, the people's choice, though what he offers beyond a baseball name is the question here.
Manfred has the ability to influence this sale by shaping the ownership vote approving it. Loria isn't the most popular guy in the ownership class. And this market has underachieved so long the other owners have to be tired of giving revenue-sharing millions to it.
So the first question Manfred has to ask Jeter's group -- meaning whoever is the moneybags behind the Jeter facade -- and Romney is: Do you want the Marlins as an investment or are you in it to win?
There's a difference. The Marlins need smart money spent on it. They need what Micky Arison did for the Heat, what Steve Ross did after years of trying with the Dolphins.
They need an owner willing to build the product -- and lose money in the short term doing that. Selig dumped an owner with little money and little baseball sense on this market.
What will Manfred do? He's this market's hope right now.
Sports on 06/04/2017