Jeter is going from dynasty to a sinkhole
Derek Jeter’s the man in Miami, a wise choice by baseball to run the dysfunctional Marlins, and so far he’s hitting .500.
The Jeter ownership group wants to dump a couple of remnants from ruinous Jeffrey Loria’s ownership, part of severing ties with the group that bamboozled and alienated the community and fan base.
The new group, expected to be approved in September, doesn’t want David Samson, the team president and Loria’s stepson, so Samson’s gone. Jeter wants to start fresh and doesn’t want reminders of a poorly run franchise or to hear from someone who served as Loria’s mouthpiece going all the way back to when Loria spoiled baseball in Montreal.
Then there’s the 73-foot structure beyond the wall in left-center, the oversize, gaudy and out-of-place mound of brightness that lights up and spins after Marlins home runs. It’s about as appealing as Rusty the Mechanical Man, the twodimensional character that clumsily moved along the rightfield wall when the Giants opened their park in 2000.
Rusty was a bad idea that didn’t last, and the Jeter group reportedly wants the monstrosity in Miami gone, too. This isn’t as easy as dumping Samson, however. Miami-Dade County insists the structure is staying put because it was bought (for $2.5 million) with public art funds and permanently installed.
Apparently, it’s classified as art. In fact, required art. Buildings built by the county are supposed to include artwork, and the building was county constructed — Loria conned taxpayers into building him a stadium with the promise he’d have competitive teams and competitive payrolls, and he mostly had neither.
Instead, he mismanaged the team, pocketed revenue-sharing checks and lost credibility with fans. Aside from the A’s and Rays, who have the worst ballparks in the majors, the Marlins rank last in attendance, with a park that opened in 2012.
Trade Stanton? Jeter has tough decisions ahead, and it’s probably best he starts over with a rebuild, and that would mean trying to trade Giancarlo Stanton to free up money to fix holes on the roster, especially the pitching staff.
Stanton is the world’s greatest power hitter but has had his share of injuries and played more than 123 games just twice in his first seven seasons. His contract has 10 years and nearly $300 million remaining, and it’s heavily backloaded.
To trade him, the Marlins likely would eat part of his contract but would save plenty of money to use elsewhere. Jeter’s roots suggest dynasties are built from the ground up — Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Bernie Williams and Jeter were homegrown Yankees — so the bet here is that his plans to build and win are more long term than short term.
That probably means Jeter can hold on to another old Yankee, manager Don Mattingly, for the near future if the focus is about developing and not necessarily contending.
The Marlins do little well: bad attendance, a lousy TV contract, a thin farm system and countless questionable business practices, so Jeter is inheriting a mess. He’ll head baseball and business operations but has no experience in either, and will need to answer to his bosses, the chief investors.
Then again, Jeter succeeds in almost everything he does, so the assumption is he’ll do well so long as he hires quality baseball officials around him. His first major chore might be trading Stanton, and the Giants would be among the teams listening.
It’ll take a long time to regain trust and goodwill among South Floridians, which Loria did a masterful job losing, and Jeter’s the right guy to pick up the pieces and distance the new Marlins from the Loria Marlins.
Boston reckoning: Kudos to Red Sox owner John Henry for being open to renaming Yawkey Way, which was named after former Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, who blocked African Americans from playing in Boston until well after every other team had integrated.
Not until 1959 did the Red Sox include an African American on the roster, and this was years after scout George Digby recommended a teenager named Willie Mays of the Negro Leagues’ Birmingham Black Barons.
The opportunity to have Mays and Ted Williams in the same outfield was wasted because Yawkey and general manager Joe Cronin wanted only whites. It was 1949, the year the Giants integrated with Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson. They signed Mays in June 1950.
Yawkey Way was named in 1977 and is an extension of a public road along Fenway Park that’s funded by taxpayers. Henry told the Boston Herald that he’s “haunted” by Yawkey’s ownership practices.
With racial tensions heightening and Confederate statues and monuments attracting escalated scrutiny following last weekend’s deadly unrest in Charlottesville, Va., the Red Sox are willing to remove a symbol of their racist past.
William B. Gould IV, Stanford Law School professor emeritus and a Red Sox fan since he was 10 in 1946, first wrote in the Boston Globe in the mid-’80s about changing the name and got criticized, including by a Globe columnist claiming Yawkey didn’t have a racist bone in his body.
Of Yawkey, Gould, an African American, wrote, “Not only was his conduct immoral, but also impractical in that it was a primary factor in the losing records of the Sox between 1952 and the early ’60s.”
The Yawkey Foundation said it’s “disheartened” by Henry’s stance. While respecting the foundation’s philanthropic work, Henry said he’d like to move forward and have the street named after David Ortiz. It’s not the first time Henry has suggested a name change.
From this end, there’s one name that’s most fitting: Pumpsie Green Way.
Green, 83, who lives in El Cerrito, was the Red Sox’s first African American. In a classy move, Green gave a statement to the Providence Journal through his daughter, Keisha Green Joyner, that it would be “a very good choice” to name the street after Ortiz.