Jeter reportedly set to reap huge benefits for tearing down the Marlins
It seems the appropriate punishment for taking control of the Miami Marlins and turning them into a glorified farm team for the Yankees isn’t to be run out of town on a rail.
For Derek Jeter, the “punishment” is roughly $8.8 million in bonuses over the next five years for making the Marlins profitable as part of the infamous “Project Wolverine.”
The Marlins shipped Giancarlo Stanton to Jeter’s old team in New York as the most high-profile move in their fire sale, setting the Miami sports media on fire and landing ESPN in hot water with the commissioner’s office when the network’s Dan Le Batard roasted Rob Manfred on his radio show.
Marcell Ozuna and Dee Gordon have also been shipped out of town, while Christian Yelich and Martin Prado are reportedly on the trading block and expected to be out before spring training.
All of this isn’t unusual in sports. Cost-cutting can, if it’s done right, combine franchise profitability with rebuilding through the player development process. You need look no further than the World Series champion Houston Astros — who lost a combined 324 games between 2011-2013 — that rebuilding around young players can eventually pay off.
Where it gets just plain silly is in Jeter and co-owner Bruce Sherman asserting that part of this path to profitability includes an expected rise in fan revenue.
As in, those same fans who now believe that the Marlins ownership doesn’t care about putting a competitive product on the field. Why on earth would anyone bother to show up to watch a Triple-A minor league team take on major league competition?
Or maybe ownership believes that attendance has nowhere to go but up after the Marlins placed 28th among 30 MLB teams in attendance last season, drawing a paltry 20,395 fans per home date, ahead of only the Oakland A’s and Tampa Bay Rays, two lousy teams that play in run-down, depressing stadiums.
Where these fans are supposed to come from, nobody knows. The Marlins haven’t drawn more than 22,000 fans per game since 2012, the year their new stadium opened. They were third from the bottom in attendance in 2003, and they won the World Series that year.
Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reports that “according to an August version of Project Wolverine — a document pitching potential investors on joining the Marlins ownership group and shared with the Miami Herald by sources — Jeter will make an annual bonus based on the Marlins being profitable.
That bonus would pay him $2 million in 2018, $1.7 million in 2019, $1.1 million in 2020, $2 million in 2021 and $2 million in 2022. The Marlins declined to say if the amount of those bonus payments were altered in subsequent versions of Wolverine.”
Furthermore — and here’s where things devolve into gross speculation on the Marlins ownership group’s part — “Project Wolverine projects the Marlins will have a $68 million profit in 2018 (though it would drop to $23 million without a large projected up-front payment from Fox Sports on a Marlins-proposed TV rights extension). Wolverine projects a $10 million profit in 2019, $15.8 million in 2020 and $22 million in 2021. Those figures are based on projections that include sharp rises in attendance and sponsorship revenue.”
Once again, where is that sharp rise in attendance coming from? Baseball has been a losing proposition in Florida outside of spring training ever since MLB expanded into the Sunshine State in the first place, despite what on paper looks like the ideal potential fanbase of Hispanics in general and Cubans in particular.
If the ownership group just admitted they were going to cheap it up, run a bargain-basement payroll, and just accept that they couldn’t get 20,000 fans in the seats and therefore had to have a roster for that reality, it would be less of a slap in the face.
But instead, a combination of payroll slashing and accounting tricks (MLB is distributing $50 million to each team next year as a result of selling its digital media property BAMTech to Disney, which owns ESPN, and teams get to consider that operating revenue on their books) means the Marlins are profitable, and the sole useful purpose of that fact is that Jeter gets to line his pockets.
If Manfred cared about the integrity of the game, he’d intervene. Maybe not by forcing the Marlins to field a competitive team; you need money for that, and South Florida’s proven unwilling to spend the money to go to baseball games.
Maybe the Marlins (and the Rays, for that matter) need to be either contracted or taken over by the league and moved the way the Montreal Expos became the thriving, popular, and most of all contending Washington Nationals. Move them somewhere — Raleigh-Durham or Memphis or Santo Domingo — and stop the madness that’s making Jeter rich at the expense of what’s left of baseball in Florida.
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