Judge Judy: Marlins, Sherman are good fit
TV personality, team’s new owner are cousins
Everyone who follows baseball is familiar with Derek Jeter, the popular face of the group with an agreement pending to buy the Miami Marlins.
Jeter’s primary partner, Bruce Sherman, is the mystery man in the deal. But not to Judy Sheindlin, known to millions of TV viewers as Judge Judy and to Sherman as cousin.
“I’ve known him since he was a baby. He is a wonderful, brilliant and astute businessman, so the Marlins are lucky to have him,”
Sheindlin said this week in a phone interview about Sherman, who emerged as the lead investor late in negotiations to buy the team from Jeffrey Loria.
Sherman, 69, a retired asset manager who lives in Naples, reportedly is putting up as much as $400 million of the $1.2 billion sale price to become the control person of the team. Jeter, contributing about $25 million, will run the baseball and business operations, according to the agreement submitted to Major League Baseball, Marlins president David Samson said last week.
Sherman, who came from a middle-class background in Queens, N.Y., and built a fortune on value investments, is a newcomer to baseball (he reportedly once made an unsuccessful bid on a minor league team).
Known for being mediashy, he has yet to speak publicly about his interest in the Marlins and why he is willing to take on the risk and challenge of turning around a money-losing franchise that lags in attendance and struggles for acceptance in a skeptical market.
Sheindlin will likely get the scoop on that.
“We’re having dinner in about 10 days and he’s going to give me the skinny as to why,” she said, adding: “I know he’s going to have a wonderful time. It’s a perfect thing for him. I know he’s been interested in baseball for a long time. I think he had an interest in a minor league team before.”
“But Bruce doesn’t invest his time, his energy or his money in anything that he doesn’t believe in,” Sheindlin continued. “That’s why he became the businessman that he became. And that’s what made him a wealthy man.”
Sherman co-founded the wealth management firm Private Capital Management in Naples in 1985 with Miles Collier, the grandson of Barron Gift Collier, namesake of Collier County in southwest Florida. PCM gained traction initially managing financial affairs for the Collier family.
After the firm thrived in the late 1900s and early 2000s, Sherman became a controversial figure as the activist shareholder who successfully pushed Knight Ridder’s board to sell its 32 newspapers (the Miami Herald among them) to the McClatchy Co. in 2006 for a cash and stock deal worth $4.5 billion.
The deal and subsequent breakup of the chain was cited as the tipping point in the downward spiral of the newspaper industry and Sherman was tagged as “the paper shredder” in a 2007 article in Conde Nast Portfolio magazine.
Sherman and PCM were also among the biggest losers in the Bear Stearns meltdown, taking a hit of nearly $500 million.
A career built on a long run of capitalizing on stocks that others undervalued ended amid the turmoil of the Great Recession when Sherman stepped down from CPM in 2009.
In his final interview before retiring, Sherman disputed reports that he had been forced out after assets under the company’s management had plummeted from a peak of $31 billion to $2.4 billion.
“They went down because the market went down,” Sherman told the Naples Daily News.
Gregg Powers, who succeeded Sherman as CEO of Private Capital Management, did not respond to requests to discuss his former mentor’s venture into baseball.
Since his retirement, Sherman has been most visible for philanthropic efforts, notably through the Naples Winter Wine Festival, which has raised $161 million over 17 years for the Naples Children & Education Foundation. He and his wife, Cynthia, are former cochairs of the event and are listed as lifetime trustees of the NCEF. Cynthia, Sherman’s second wife, is a founder of the Holocaust Museum and Education Center of Southwest Florida, located in Naples.
It was during the festival’s charity wine auction in 2006 that Sherman and Sheindlin engaged in a spirited bidding duel for a Mediterranean cruise on a private yacht. Sheindlin dropped out after Sherman upped the ante to $520,000.
“I recall that we were bidding against each other because I didn’t see who it was that was bidding at the other end of the room,” Sheindlin said. “But as I said, if he sees something that he wants, and he thinks that it’s the right thing, he will get it.”
He also established the Sherman Prize, which rewards efforts of researchers and caregivers in the fight to overcome Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Sherman’s father and both his adult daughters have been afflicted with Crohn’s.
“He’s a wonderful, philanthropic man,” said Sheindlin, who with her husband, Jerry, bought a residence in Naples in 1999 at Sherman’s urging. “He cares about people, he cares about the community that he lives in. And he’s just an all-around good guy.”
What sort of baseball owner Sherman will be and his role in running the Marlins have yet to be seen. Sherman represented the Jeter group this week in Chicago when the MLB ownership committee began reviewing financing of the sale agreement. Jeter did not attend the meeting; his wife gave birth to their first daughter Thursday.
“Bruce Sherman truly is a man who has a passion for baseball and a love of baseball,” said Samson, the Marlins president who negotiated the deal on behalf of Loria and will not be retained by new ownership.
When Sherman was driving the Knight Ridder deal, Gary Pruitt, then-CEO of McClatchy, offered insight into Sherman’s meticulous business style.
“He was on top of everything that was going on with our company,” Pruitt told the New York Times. “He knew details of who owned our stock and what percentage. He knew all the revenue numbers and regional revenue numbers. It was not a passing or cavalier knowledge.”
Pruitt, now CEO of the Associated Press, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Sherman, who rarely gives interviews — he did not speak to reporters covering the owners’ meetings this week — discussed his start in business and finance for the book “Investment Gurus.” He told author Peter J. Tanous that he made his first stock trade on his 21st birthday when he sold 10 shares of Polaroid for $180 a share after researching and concluding the stock was overvalued— his father had bought it at $20 a share for him as a bar mitzvah present eight years earlier.
That was the beginning of his infatuation with the stock market. In “Investment Gurus,” Sherman outlined a philosophy of identifying merit in stocks that other market experts were not high on. He’d buy them when they were cheap and had a method for determining the opportune time to unload them.
Now Sherman faces the challenge of joining with Jeter to try and lead the Marlins to a level of success that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said can be attained in this market given effective ownership.
Sheindlin has no doubt that her cousin is up to the task.
“He invests his energy in doing due diligence in everything that he invests in,” she said. “He would not invest at this stage of his life his time, his energy or his money in anything that he thought would not be a success.”