Move over John Fisher, baseball has a new worst owner.
After grossly overpaying for the Miami Marlins in 2017 ($1.2 billion), Bruce Sherman is now systematically destroying them.
As if Fisher’s stripped down A’s aren’t a big enough eye sore for baseball as a lame duck franchise in Oakland, now you have Sherman, under-financed from the get-go in Miami, turning the Marlins into another attendance-challenged dumpster fire, further embarrassing the game. It was bad enough Fisher ran off Kim Ng as Marlins GM last winter after she’d literally traded the Marlins into the postseason with a series of inspired deals — and replaced her with Peter Bendix, a sabermetrics computer nerd out of the Rays organization. He signed only one free agent — greatly diminished shortstop Tim Anderson – and otherwise made no effort to improve the team. Now Sherman is allowing Bendix to undo Ng’s good work, starting with the ill-conceived trade of the Marlins’ best player and top gate attraction, two-time batting champ Luis Arraez, to San Diego for three far away prospects of questionable potential and Korean reliever Woo-Suk Go, to whom the Padres gave a two-year, $4.5 million contract last winter but so far proved quite hittable in Double-A.
It’s going to take at least three years before Bendix’s first trade can be properly assessed — that’s how far away the two main prospects — outfielder Dillon Head (a speedster who hit .267 with 19 strikeouts and 15 walks in Rookie League and A ball last year) and Nathan Martorella (a marginal lefty DH-type) — are from the big leagues. When you consider that Ng traded an All-Star caliber starting pitcher in Pablo Lopez for Arraez a year ago, the return from the Padres for him hardly seems close to equal value and the scouts and execs I talked to all say it was a fleecing for the Padres. Incredibly, Bendix said he had to make the trade when he did because he didn’t think such a good deal would be there if he waited until later in the season.
Now that’s naivety of an over-his-skis analytics nerd. Sherman hired Bendix because he wanted the Marlins to emulate the Rays model under Stu Sternberg on the other side of the state in which they’ve been able to consistently field competitive teams with the lowest payrolls in the industry. What Sherman doesn’t seem to understand is that Rays GM Erik Neander may rely heavy on analytics, but he also gives equal or more value to scouts who’ve been responsible for the many trades that have kept Tampa Bay competitive.
And it probably says everything about Bendix that nobody was ever quite sure what he did with the Rays and that no one has been hired to replace him.
Right now the morale in Miami is the lowest in baseball. The day after the Arraez trade, the Marlins lost 20-4 to — ironically — Fisher’s A’s, while Arraez became the first player in Padres history to have four hits in his debut. Marlins manager Skip Schumaker could see this coming after Sherman forced Ng out. He was Ng’s hire and rewarded her faith by winning NL Manager of the Year honors last year. But he asked Sherman to remove the option for 2025 off his contract, making him a free agent after the season if he isn’t (probably) fired first.
The shame in Miami is that the Marlins play in one of the most aesthetically beautiful ballparks in baseball but are averaging the 29th fewest fans per game (12,700) while taking in $60 million in revenue sharing as the sell-off of their highest salaried players continues this summer. It is baseball’s shame that theirs is the only professional sports franchise in Miami that doesn’t draw.
As a sparse crowd headed into LoanDepot Park Friday night to watch the Marlins face the Philadelphia Phillies, a handful of disgruntled Miami fans remained on the outskirts of the ballpark, protesting the Arraez trade and yelling passionately in hopes their message would be heard. “We are only a few here but the majority of fans are disgusted,” said Luis De Armas, a decades-long Marlins fan and the organizer of Friday’s protest. “We want to continue coming to the games but not when it remains a losing club. All because of an owner who promised us one thing and did something else.”
It’s just too bad Jorge Mas, the Cuban billionaire businessman who owns the Major League Soccer Inter Miami and playing to sellout crowds after signing Lionel Messi, could not have bought the Marlins back in 2017. Mas tried, reportedly offering as much $1.17 billion for them, and would have been the perfect owner for the Marlins. But Major League Baseball and previous Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria wanted Derek Jeter to have an ownership share in a franchise and when Jeter’s group fell way short on the money, they arranged a marriage between him and Sherman to make that happen.
In retrospect, that was one of Rob Manfred’s most regrettable decisions, right up there with letting Fisher move the A’s from a Top 10 TV market to the 39th in Las Vegas.
IT’S A MADD, MADD WORLD
A tip of the hat to the Brewers’ Willy Adames who called his game-winning home run last Tuesday against the Royals. The Brewers were trailing 5-3 when Adames was kneeling in the on-deck circle with two Brewer runners on base in the ninth inning. As he later explained it, the fans in the box seats started needling him. “They told me they wanted me to hit a three-run homer,” he said, to which Adames responded, “OK, I got you!” and then proceeded to hit an 83-mph curve ball from Royals closer James McArthur over the fence. “That was really priceless,” said Brewers manager Pat Murphy. … On Tuesday Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras suffered a double whammy when he was struck by the bat of the Mets’ J.D. Martinez and suffered a broken left arm as well as being charged with catcher’s interference. You may have heard, catcher’s interference, which used to be a rare occurrence, has now become an epidemic. From 2010-2018 the average catcher’s interference calls in a year was 35. In 2002 there were nine catcher’s interference calls. In 2022 there were 74 and last year 97. This year as of Friday there had already been 32. The reason for this is that catchers are crouching closer to the batters in order to better frame pitches. Pitch framing is one of the tenets of the new analytics, but it would seem it’s now getting dangerous. Robo umps can’t come soon enough.
