Major League Baseball

Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria tries to buy forgiveness

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 12:46 p.m. ET

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Baseball is not, in general, a morality play. (Tell your local columnist!) Clutch hitting isn't real. Clubhouse chemistry is, to treat it kindly, overvalued. Statistical analysis, astute scouting and (hardest of all to accept, for most people) random chance determine the outcomes of games, series and seasons much more often than soft factors do.

There is one moral concern, though, in which baseball trains us expertly, and here it is: Sin leaves stains, and those stains are exceptionally hard to get out. It's possible to avoid having one's worst transgressions register on the game's cultural level, but if that doesn't happen -- if word gets out, and one's dirty laundry gets aired -- things have a way of sticking. Spare yourself a long walk through the game's sordid history. Alex Rodriguez and Pete Rose can tell you all about this, right now. It's not entirely clear whether Rodriguez and Rose harbor genuine contrition for their misdeeds, but it's pretty obvious that neither will ever achieve real forgiveness for them -- however sincerely they might want it -- from fans or from the institution.

Maybe Jeffrey Loria can tell you a similar story. The Miami Marlins' owner has a record not unlike those of Rodriguez and Rose: He has not only betrayed the public trust, but done so brazenly and repeatedly. Now he's trying to earn that trust back. He signed Giancarlo Stanton to a 13-year, $325 million deal back in November, and last week he authorized a nearly $50 million commitment to 23-year-old outfielder Christian Yelich. Between those two bookends, the Marlins traded 13 players in six different transactions, brought back nine new ones, and reshaped a roster that won 77 games in 2014. They made two modest but important free-agent additions, in Mike Morse and Ichiro Suzuki, to shore up their lineup and bench. This is now a competitive team, though by no means a favorite. Yelich's deal, which guarantees more money to a player in Yelich's service-time class than all but one other extension on record, is the final brushstroke of a picture Loria and his front office are painting: a new era in Miami, with a new (and newly earnest) focus on winning.

You'll forgive everyone -- fans, analysts, and players alike -- if they defer elation for the time being. Loria made his money in art dealing, bought the Montreal Expos in 1999, sold them to Major League Baseball in 2002 (a part of an orchestrated effort by MLB to dismantle the franchise, which eventually landed in Washington, D.C.) for a six-fold profit, and bought the Florida Marlins at a discount in the same, sweet deal.

The Marlins won the World Series in 2003, but when that didn't give Loria the leverage he had wanted in negotiations for public financing of a new stadium, he grew increasingly penurious. No team spent less on payroll from 2006-09 than the Marlins did. Loria's boat so unabashedly resisted the rising tide of salaries league-wide that MLB and its players' union forced the organization to formalize an agreement to increase payroll for the years 2010-12, to bring the team into compliance with the collective bargaining agreement's revenue-sharing provisions.

In the meantime, Loria finally succeeded in Miami where he had failed in Montreal. He extracted significant public funding from Miami-Dade County and the City of Miami, without a public referendum, and despite some spirited pushback from some corners of the community. An ugly victory over his detractors, perhaps, but one that seemed to promise permanent change. The deal with the MLB Players Association ran through 2012, when the park opened. Loria's story was that the boon of the new money that the new park would create would end any need for the team to pinch pennies. He spent so lavishly during the winter prior to the 2012 season that, if you squinted so hard you cut off the neural pathways from your eyes to your long-term memory, you could almost see the Loria Plan materializing. Then, as they do when Loria is around, things went wrong.

The 2012 Marlins were bad, and their attendance never reached the heights attendance usually reaches during a park's debut season. Miami was drawing fewer fans to an average home date than the league median, despite its big names, splashy new identity and wild new home. So Loria approved blowing up another roster. The 2013 Marlins, liberated from that deal with the MLBPA, cut their payroll by just over half, and lost 100 games. If you believe Loria and the Marlins' baseball brain trust (Larry Beinfest is gone, but Dan Jennings and Michael Hill run the show much the way Beinfest did), there was nothing but the long-term competitive interest of the team behind the 12-player trade that gutted the team in November 2012. No one does believe it, though, because Loria has sung different verses of the same song so many times before. There was no sign that Loria had truly changed. In fact, all the outward signs indicated just the opposite.

The worst part is that, even amid an active offseason clearly aimed at winning in 2015, there's some evidence that Loria isn't playing it straight. Miami gave up a lot -- including top prospect Andrew Heaney, its well-regarded first-round pick from 2012 -- to land Dee Gordon, Dan Haren and Miguel Rojas from the Dodgers in December. It likely wouldn't have taken such a rich package of talent to land those three players, but for the fact that the Dodgers agreed to pay the full 2015 salaries of Gordon and Haren ($13 million and change in total) in the deal. The Yankees are chipping in $3 million for each of the next two years on Martin Prado, a little more than 25 percent of what he's owed. The Marlins' Opening Day payroll will be around $60 million. That puts them right back in the payroll cellar. Each team gets about $50 million per year from the league's national TV deals alone, so once you figure in revenue-sharing payouts and regional TV rights, the Marlins could almost turn a profit without spinning a single turnstile in 2015.

Billy Beane would be praised for his shrewdness in deals like those, but Billy Beane doesn't work for Loria. Jennings and Hill are respected baseball men, but there will always be some question about whether Loria is setting financial strictures that force them to make only payroll-neutral improvements. Hector Olivera, a 29-year-old Cuban emigre who offers significant potential help at first, second or third base, would have been a very nice addition, deepening and adding versatility to the lineup, but Miami bowed out of the bidding for him on Sunday. That was a defensible decision: Olivera is going to cost real money, and Morse, Gordon and Prado are all freshly acquired to fill the same positions Olivera might. Still, he's another talented player for whom the team refused to shell out the last dollar.

Yelich is a very good player, but his extension feels a bit richer than the market demanded. At Baseball Prospectus, we rely on PECOTA to project player performance, and although the numbers get much less reliable as the projection stretches into the future, we can and do project them more than one season out. Over the life of his new deal, PECOTA thinks Yelich can return 17.4 Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP):

Christian Yelich PECOTA Projections

Season	Age	TAv	WARP
2015	23	.283	3.0
2016	24	.280	2.6
2017	25	.278	2.5
2018	26	.288	3.1
2019	27	.274	2.1
2020	28	.268	1.8
2021	29	.277	2.3

These estimates might slant toward the upside for Yelich, though. PECOTA uses comparable players (and their established career arcs) to build a player's projection. Here are Yelich's top 10 comps, heading into this season:

Christian Yelich, PECOTA-selected comparable players (through age 22)

B.J. Upton	Justin Upton
Matt Kemp	Grady Sizemore
David Wright	Jay Bruce
Travis Snider	Jose Tabata
Lastings Milledge	Miguel Cabrera

I don't know how big a baseball fan Yelich's mother is, but if she knows her stuff, even she is raising her eyebrows as she reads these names. By age 22, Kemp, Wright, both Uptons, Sizemore, Bruce and Cabrera had showcased really impressive power at the MLB level. Yelich has a broad and valuable skill set, but power isn't in the toolbox. The two signatures of his offensive game are an extreme opposite-field approach and an extreme ground-ball proclivity. By no means is it impossible that he could modulate his approach and, someday, approach 20 home runs in a season. It's not all that likely, though, and if he does ever make that kind of change, we'll have to see whether he can do it without giving away any of the value he gets from being so patient and using the whole field so well.

Still, let's grant the very sturdy premise that PECOTA saw me coming on those points, and has duly accounted for what Yelich is, and isn't. In the current free-agent market, this kind of production is worth well over $49.57 million, which is the exact guarantee. Yelich wasn't about to become a free agent, though. He was due to make the league-minimum salary (a shade over $500,000) for both this year and next, before becoming arbitration-eligible. Given the way arbitration limits earning potential, it's not clear that the Marlins got a bargain good enough to make this deal worthwhile.

According to rumors that circulated in December, the Marlins initially approached Yelich about a contract like Pirates left fielder Starling Marte's six-year, $31 million deal, signed last spring. Like Yelich (on whom the Marlins hold an option for 2022, at $15 million), Marte signed away up to eight seasons of his rights. However, Marte got only six of those seasons guaranteed, and the total amount the Pirates must pay comes out to about 65 percent of what Miami must pay Yelich. With more speed and power, Marte is, if anything, the kind of player who could have made more than Yelich in arbitration.

Now, Marte originally signed with Pittsburgh in January 2007, for $85,000, as an international amateur free agent. Yelich got $1.7 million as a late first-round pick in the 2010 draft. Maybe it was going to take a whole lot more to lock down Yelich than to lock down Marte, even if we grant that Marte is at least an equivalent player, because Yelich already had some security that Marte didn't. If that's true, though, why did the Marlins agree to Yelich's demands? Even baking in inflation, Miami is paying more for Yelich than the Rockies paid to lock up Troy Tulowitzki in January 2008 (on a six-year, $31 million deal). They're paying more than the Cubs did to lock up Anthony Rizzo in May 2013 (seven years, $41 million), and the Cubs not only would have owed Rizzo more anyway -- he was in line to be eligible for arbitration a year sooner than Yelich -- but got control of an extra year of Rizzo's services, without guaranteeing it.

If this is what Yelich's camp demanded, why not just go year-to-year, knowing Yelich was assuming much more risk than the team was? I suspect the answer lies with Loria himself. This is more than Yelich deserved to make, but perhaps Loria needed to demonstrate his willingness to overpay in order to change the perception of the way he does business, both from outside the organization, and from within.

The same goes for Stanton, by the way. Thirteen years of utterly unprecedented financial commitment, and the Marlins still gave their superstar an escape hatch. After six seasons (admittedly, six seasons in which they will pay him much less than will be due for the latter seven, if he stays), Stanton can opt out of his deal and head for free agency, to seek his fortune elsewhere. Such opt-outs are becoming fairly standard practices in free-agent deals -- Zack Greinke has one in his deal with the Dodgers, and Yasmany Tomas has one in the contract he signed with the Diamondbacks just this fall. They're not a common feature of extensions like Stanton's, though, and again, there really isn't an extension like Stanton's. The twin concessions of such a massive payday and an opportunity to forgo it aren't usually necessary when the team still has two years of control over a player. They were necessary for Loria.

Our Playoff Odds report only gives the Marlins a 30 percent shot at reaching the playoffs, but for once, their owner seems willing to play that hand, rather than fold it cynically away. Yelich and Stanton have been in the organization long enough to feel the sting of Loria's last betrayal. They made him pay for his sins, but they let him pay in cash, instead of flesh, and Loria caught a break there. In baseball, absolution is rarely so straightforward a transaction, and if Loria wants to win back the trust of people who aren't already under his employ, he might have hard work left to do.