and the Marlins brass has promised investors that the team’s payroll will shrink from about $115 million last Opening Day—already in the bottom third of the MLB payroll rankings—to somewhere in the neighborhood of $55 million, which is about a third of the MLB median. This is not a baseball trade. This is a liquidation of assets.
[...]
Even in a franchise that’s suffered a post–World Series fire sale under Wayne Huizenga, then 15 years of slimy hucksterism from former owner Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins are exploring new depths of bad faith, and drilling into substances so repulsive our baseball vocabulary is not up to the task of describing them. Woe unto those who call this move “clearing payroll,” which implies that the Marlins might better spend Stanton’s salary elsewhere. Not only is that contrary to what we know about the Bruce Sherman–led investment group that bought the team in September—where should they spend that money if not on the NL MVP? [...] Sure, Stanton’s owed up to $295 million over the next decade, but perhaps the Marlins could’ve found part of that sum in the half-billion dollars that local government gave them to build a stadium five years ago?
Professional sports franchises operate in this strange ether in which they are privately owned, for-profit enterprises but serve as civic institutions nonetheless. For this reason they inspire local loyalty and are often government subsidized, with the unspoken covenant that the private owner will operate not only to turn a profit, but to make them successful on the field. Sherman has broken faith with the city that supports his franchise—and for all the jokes about Marlins Park being empty all the time, the team sold 1.65 million tickets last year, which was 27th in baseball but still actual millions—for the purpose of paying down some $400 million in debt resulting from the purchase of the team, and presumably selling the club for a profit when that’s done. Miami—indeed, the nation as a whole—has been suckered into taking billionaires at their word for too long, when most billionaires got so rich in the first place by wringing every last dollar out of companies, cities, and people, then leaving desolate ruins in their wake.
Sherman has experience doing just that to beloved privately owned civic institutions, when a little more than a decade ago, he gutted the Knight Ridder newspaper company, leaving dozens of the country’s most prestigious news organizations—including the Miami Herald—with skeleton staffs and shoestring budgets. The baseball world should have known better than to greet Sherman’s purchase of the team as a relief.
