Former Marlins owner Loria dishes on the ‘horrible thing’ Jeter did and a lot more

Out of the public eye for six years, former Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has resurfaced, promoting his new book, “From the Front Row: Reflections of a Major League Baseball Owner and Modern Art Dealer.”

Now 82 and living in New York City, Loria — in both the book (which he wrote himself) and during a 50-minute phone conversation with the Miami Herald — reflected on the Marlins’ 2003 World Series title, the death of Jose Fernandez in a boating accident, his sale of the team and more.

Loria, who owned the Marlins from 2002 through 2017 after three years as managing general partner of the Montreal Expos, remains immensely disappointed by former Marlins CEO Derek Jeter’s decision to remove the stadium’s most distinct and unique feature — the home run sculpture — from behind the center field wall.

“Jeter came in and destroyed the ballpark,” Loria said during the phone conversation, his first public comments since selling the team. “Destroying public art was a horrible thing to do.”

Loria’s friend, artist Red Grooms, designed the sculpture under terms of a $2.5 million contract with Miami-Dade County, and it was a polarizing piece of the ballpark, eliciting praise from some, ridicule from others.

The sculpture erupted whenever the Marlins hit a home run or won a game, sending mechanical marlins spinning, white seagulls soaring, pelicans dancing and fountains spraying in a 29-second cycle. The sculpture now sits on an outside plaza, easy to miss for fans attending games.

“I asked the artist about getting it back, and I told him I would help him find a new home for it,” Loria said. “He didn’t want to get involved. Now it will rot outside where it is… condemned to neglect and outdoor decay.”

Loria’s disdain for Jeter’s changes to the ballpark extend beyond that.

“I was fastidious about all the color we put into the building and it was changed; it didn’t have to be changed,” Loria said. “They covered up all the [colorful] tiles, which we brought in from Europe. To me it reflected the culture of Miami. Now it’s all blue. It’s ridiculous. The amenities like the fish tanks behind home plate — they were there for the kids — and they got rid of them. It’s silly.”

Loria touched on other topics during the phone interview:

▪ He said he has no regrets about selling the team or selling it specifically to Jeter and Bruce Sherman, because they were the only ones willing to pay $1.2 billion, down from the original $1.6 billion asking price. Jorge Mas and Jeb Bush (who were named in the book as the two other primary bidders) fell short of that number.

“We received more value for the team than I thought possible,” Loria said.

What he misses about ownership is “the camaraderie. I like helping the players in my own quiet way. I was at Dodger Stadium [earlier this month] and I had a lovely chat with [former Marlins shortstop] Miguel Rojas. I said, ‘Are you doing what I suggested? Saving your money?’

“I got a call from [former Marlins second baseman] Dee Gordon a couple years ago. He said, ‘I followed your advice and saved my money and my family and I have a hydroponic lettuce farm’” in Fort Meade.

▪ He said he sold the team in part because of the death of Fernandez, at 24, in an overnight, high-speed boating accident in September 2016. Toxicology reports indicated that Fernandez had cocaine in his system and was legally drunk on the night that he died.

“I had been so affected by Jose’s death that I found it difficult to look to the future and thinking something else like this might happen,” Loria said.

▪ Loria said didn’t know that Fernandez “had a speedboat.”

The irony is that Loria said he had convinced Fernandez not to buy a flashy car that would tempt him to drive at dangerous speeds.

“I told him you can’t speed around Miami. We looked at regular cars.” As Loria notes in the book, “ultimately he chose not to purchase a super fast car but a practical Sedan, and we all breathed a little earlier.”

Seven years after Fernandez’s passing, the pain is still evident in Loria’s voice.

“He was trying to have all of the wonderful things America had to offer,” Loria said. “There was no kid I ever knew who was more driven to be successful as an American than this young man.”

Fernandez attempted four times to leave Cuba before finally making it to the United States at age 15. Loria paid for his funeral services and gave the team’s life insurance payment to his family.

“Jose had a profound influence on me,” Loria wrote, concluding an 11-page chapter on the former All Star.

▪ Loria suggested that Jeter — who parted ways with Sherman in February 2022 — wasn’t prepared to run a team.

“He was a magnificent player, and he should have asked for some advice or not been so hasty,” Loria said during the phone conversation. “Playing shortstop doesn’t translate to success in a business environment. You have to learn, you have to ask questions.

“They wanted to do a reset, but they did a really poor job of trading Christian Yelich, got [no big-league quality player in return]. They got rid of Jim Cuthbert — who recommended the Marcell Ozuna/Sandy Alcantara trade [to Jeter] — and a lot of scouts…

“I think Derek felt what he was doing was right. You have to admire a guy who wants to work hard at it, but you have to have experience before you make those executive decisions. Many of their [decisions] didn’t work out.”

In the book, Loria said Jeter instructed team president David Samson “to fire” his “superb talent evaluators and baseball minds” on “the first day of the new ownership and then promptly fired David the next day.”

He wrote that the “firing of Marlins special assistants and Hall of Fame players Andre Dawson and Tony Perez was handled in the same poorly thought-out way: Derek instructed David to fire them rather than have a conversation himself.”

▪ Beyond the removal of ballpark art, what most angers Loria about Jeter was his dismissal of longtime scout Marty Scott in 2017, while he was in the hospital recovering from colon cancer surgery.

“He did something awful to my scout, Marty Scott, fired him in the hospital and cut off his phone,” Loria said. “I took care of Marty.”

▪ Loria has no issues with Sherman, but the two men don’t keep in contact.

“Bruce Sherman is a lovely man, a perfect gentleman,” Loria said.

▪ Loria won a World Series in his second year as owner (2003), but the team had a losing record in his final eight seasons (2010-2017).

Fans complained about the team’s low payroll, which rose dramatically in the first year in the new ballpark ($101 million in 2012) but then was slashed to the $50 million to $75 million range the next four seasons. Loria’s $115 million payroll in his final season as owner remains the largest in team history.

Sherman’s payrolls have varied widely, from $42 million to $100 million, per Cotsbaseball.com.

Loria suggested that even with a new ballpark, this market — with modest television revenue and attendance that ranks among the worst in baseball — cannot sustain particularly high payrolls.

“I put money into it constantly; it was never enough,” Loria said.

Loria discussed the payroll challenges over several pages of the book: “The vast majority of my years as an owner in Miami ended with a monetary loss… There is no reason to finance annual losses in any business, simply hoping to recoup your investment when the business is sold.”

Loria also wrote: “Looking back and thinking about my tenure, I refuse to apologize for treating my team like a business and not a 501(c)(3) charity. Every time I am approached by a fan who wonders why I didn’t pour even more of my own money into the team, I… ask that fan whether he or she would operate his or her business that way.”

▪ He said he doesn’t regret the Little Havana location of the publicly financed stadium but concedes it’s difficult to draw from Broward and Palm Beach counties.

“Miami is a wonderful city [but] this market is challenging” to draw fans, Loria said. “It’s a vertical market; you don’t draw from around you. You have to draw from above or below” to have big attendance numbers.

“Vertical markets are a tough place to draw. In the summer, the snowbirds go back home. I don’t think we would have drawn some of the people we drew in Little Havana to the games if we were [at a ballpark site in North Dade or Broward]. The Latin community [has] great fans. [But] it’s a sport you can’t go to every night because of the cost.”

▪ He said he watches “a lot of Marlins games on TV, more than half of their games” and “I’m hoping they do well. They are getting better.”

Among the notable revelations in the book, which is available on Amazon.

▪ He said pitcher Mark Buehrle — after he was traded to Toronto in 2013 one year after signing a four-year, $58 million deal with the Marlins — “sent me several texts that were full of vitriolic and filthy language, due to the fact that he couldn’t take his pit bull dogs to Toronto, which had banned the species. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was aghast at what Mark had written but added that he was not surprised.”

▪ He revisits how former manager Joe Girardi told him to “Sit down and shut the hell up” - in front of fans - after Loria had questioned a call by umpire Larry Vanover; how he authorized firing Girardi after the game but then changed his mind; and then dismissed him again after Girardi’s one season with the team (when he won National League Manager of the Year).

“If I had to do it over again,” Loria wrote, “I would have made [Jack McKeon] my general manager in 2006 before Joe Girardi’s departure. Then perhaps Joe, whom I admire very much, would have enjoyed a longer and happier tenure with us.” (Larry Beinfest was the Marlins’ GM at the time.)

▪ He speaks briefly about personnel mistakes, blaming his executives for missing “an opportunity to draft Jason Heyward in the first round. Instead, we drafted Matt Dominguez, who did not perform as our scouts had predicted.”

He said manager Don Mattingly “addressed problems with great aplomb, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for mediocre prior draft selections and player development weaknesses.”

I wish Loria, in the book, had offered insight on several egregious personnel mistakes; he inexplicably wrote that Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis left “when they became free agents” when they were actually dealt in one of the worst trades in modern history.

I also wish he explained why the new ballpark wasn’t the revenue panacea, as promised, and didn’t result in consistently high payrolls. The Marlins had assured local government a payroll in the midrange of teams and that never happened after year one.

Otherwise, it’s a well-crafted book, with nuggets about more than a dozen Marlins figures over the years — from McKeon (who called Loria “Jerry” during their first meeting at a Rascal House restaurant in North Miami) to former manager Mike Redmond (“his work ethic did not match Jack’s”) to Luis Castillo, Heath Bell, Jose Reyes and others.

The 448-page book, Loria’s fourth, strikes a measured balance between the two businesses that have stirred his passion for decades — baseball and art — and has enough meat to make the second half (the baseball part of the book) a worthwhile read for ardent Marlins fans.