Help Us, Barack Obama, You're Our Only Hope

Sure, the president has a flagging economy, belligerent North Korea, and other pressing issues to deal with, but that hasn't stopped a Marlins fan from petitioning the Obama administration to do something about Jeffrey Loria.

A petition was posted at WhiteHouse.gov Monday asking the President to champion legislation forcing teams that take public funds to build a stadium or arena to meet minimum payroll requirements or else be forced to sell the team.

The petition was written by the same dudes who got kicked out of Marlins Park last night. They have their own website, too: Rage Against the Marlins.

Problem 1: minimum payroll hardly guarantees a team will be competitive. (Exhibits A and B, the 2012 Marlins and Mets, who spent a combined $211 million in player salaries and lost 93 and 88 games, respectively)

Problem 2: This petition is one of the worst pieces of writing I've ever seen. The body, which is comprised of only two sentences, is below:

We call upon congress to create legislation that requires any major league sports franchise that operates within the United States, who take public tax money to help build a stadium or arena, must maintain a competitive payroll at all times, of at least 90% of the entire leagues average opening day payroll for the previous five years, for the first ten years after taking said money, and the failure to do so would invoke proceedings upon which the governing body of the league, in which the franchise in question resides, would be forced to immediately buy said franchise for fair market value, and the ownership group in question would be forced to sell it to them without dispute.

A prime example would be Jeff Loria & the way he has swindled the tax payers of Dade County for his benefit only.

So much bad grammar going on here: failing to capitalize Congress, missing apostrophes, the fact that the first paragraph is one humongous run-on sentence, and the silly use of the legal "said" to make it look like a more intelligent sentence than it actually is.

Not to worry, though, this petition has only 76 of the 100,000 signatures needed to elicit a response from the White House.

If Marlins fans really want Loria to sell the Marlins, their best shot at making it happen is by not spending a single dime on the team (tickets, merch, etc.) and hoping Loria's losses pile up enough to make it worth his while to sell. Any thought that a sitting President will force someone to sell his or her own business is pure fantasy.

Read more...

Loria be Schemin'

Hey look! Someone investigated Jeff Loria's claim that tourists, not local residents paid most of the cost of constructing Marlins Park, and it turns out he's not being entirely truthful.

Politifact has the breakdown, courtesy of the Miami Herald.

Loria is borrowing from politicians’ playbooks here: He cherry-picked a fact that puts the situation in the best light while omitting a thorough explanation. On the surface, he is correct: Much of the public funding for the stadium came from hotel bed taxes largely (though not entirely) paid for by tourists.

But these are still tax revenues that belong to the taxpayer, and if it didn't go to the Marlins, it would have gone to some other public purpose to benefit those taxpayers. He also ignores that the county will be paying off that debt for decades. His implication that locals can shrug their shoulders at that public cost, and dismiss it as coming from the wallets of out of town tourists, is disingenuous.

There is an opportunity cost to building a bauble of a stadium, but can we really expect a guy who gave a $27 million contract to "proven closer" Heath Bell to understand what opportunity cost is?

Not that it matters. Loria has already won (and MLB revenue sharing money will keep the team from losing much - if any - money in the ensuing years, so he is pretty incapable of being punished). We can stop buying tickets and merchandise, but that likely still won't be enough to make Loria feel anything resembling regret.

Read more...

About that petition...

We despise Marlins owner Jeff Loria as much as the next Marlins fan, but petitioning the Obama administration to force a sale of the team (a federal action which just can't be constitutional) seems like a dumb waste of time...

"Please force Marlins owner Jeff Loria to sell," a petition at whitehouse.gov reads. "He has lied to the people of Miami and used tax funded money." The petition was created on Tuesday. ... The petition has not exactly caught fire. As of Wednesday morning, only nine people had signed the petition. The petition needs 100,000 signatures by Feb. 21 to elicit an official response from the White House.

If you think this is an effective use of your time (and really think the federal government can spare the time and resources for such a dumb request), then we'll just back away slowly while you rant...

Read more...

Bill Maher on Ozzie Guillen

If you had to share a beer with any two people in the world, Maher and Guillen would make a great duo.

Read more...

All Together Now

An event does not become a scandal until politicians are using the event to score cheap points with their constituents. We can now call Ozzie Guillen's Castro flap a bona fide scandal:

The Chairman of the Miami-Dade Board of Commissioners has called on Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria to urge Guillen to resign.

In an open letter sent to the media on Monday, Joe A. Martinez said "there is no alternative that would be satisfactory" after Guillen's "I love Fidel Castro" quote in an upcoming edition of Time Magazine.

"To say you respect Fidel Castro, suggests he also respects dictators such as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, Adolf Hitler and Sadam Hussein," the letter reads.

It's got everything included in a paint-by-numbers umbrage kit: a proposed punishment that doesn't fit the crime, Hitler reference, and public shaming. But what is more shameful: Guillen's words about Castro, or using those words to make yourself look like the arbiter of common sense and protector of the people?

Read more...

Tilting at Windmills in Little Havana

Discussion of Fidel Castro and US-Cuba policy is where reasoned logic goes to die, but someone needs to point out the petty hypocrisy of a local anti-Castro group calling for the job of Ozzie Guillen. Last week, Guillen said the following about Cuban dictator Fidel Castro:

"I respect Fidel Castro," Guillen was quoted as saying. "You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that mother****** is still here."

I think we can all agree that this is a dumb and shortsighted thing to say in public, even if you do not manage a baseball team that plays its home games in Little Havana. But really, can anyone say with a straight face that Guillen's comment makes a lick of difference in the grand scheme of things?

The answer is yes, if you are Vigilia Mambisa, a group that plans to protest at Marlins Park and boycott the team until Guillen steps down. Never mind that the team and Guillen have both apologized for the statement (Guillen said Sunday "I'm against everything 100 percent... the way this man (been) treating people for the last 60 years"). He must be punished for saying something (a dumb joke, really) that goes against the official position on Castro held by civilized folk like you and me and Vigilia Mambisa.

But judging by their Facebook page (67 likes), and the fact that they don't even have a website, I'm guessing Vigilia Mambisa thought the Guillen controversy would be a dynamite event to exploit for their own publicity.  

But unfortunately for Vigilia Mambisa, freedom of speech applies to speech about Castro, as well. There is a place where people who speak freely and don't hide their opinions are punished, sometimes very harshly. It's called Cuba.

Irony is dead. Long live irony.

Read more...

Larry Beinfest's Next Job

Not baseball related at all:

There was a time when the Defense Department and its overseers in the congressional armed services committees did this sort of [cost/benefit] analysis routinely. But the knack, or the demand for it, dried up during "the post-9/11 decade," when the military grew "accustomed," as Gates put it in his AEI speech, to a "no-questions-asked" attitude on funding requests for anything and everything the services wanted. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the same point in hearings this past January: "We've lost our ability to prioritize, make hard decisions, make trades." [emphasis added]

Confidential to President Obama: maybe you should think about making Marlins GM Larry Beinfest your next Secretary of Defense. Sure, it will be a bummer when he trades Seal Team Six to South Korea, but soon enough, your defense budget will be cut in half and the military will still manage to outperform expectations.

Read more...

Marlins Stadium on the Rocks?

The Miami Herald reports this morning that Miami-Dade County's revenue from hotel taxes fell 22 percent in January, after falling 11 percent in December. The county plans to use hotel-tax revenue to pay for its portion of the funding for the new Marlins stadium, and the Herald says that declining revenues could cause a problem when the county commission meets to vote on the stadium financing plan in a few weeks.

County Commissioner Carlos Gimenez, who has criticized the funding plan, thinks the county should wait to approve funding when revenues are increasing. County Commissioner George Burgess, who negotiated the stadium deal with the Marlins, argues that since the stadium will be financed over 40 years, it makes little sense to "pull the plug on something if it makes sense in the long term, because things look bad in the short term.''

No one ever said building a new Marlins ballpark would be easy... perhaps Miami-Dade should look to new potential revenue streams, like taxing coffee at the cafeteria windows in South Florida. You can buy enogh coffee for four people for less than $2 at these windows, but the average cafeteria customer (according to my arbitrary estimate) spends about $20 a week at the window (if I still lived in Miami, I could easily see myself spending that much per week between cafecito and pastelitos). Add a 0.5% surcharge to coffee purchases, at an annual rate the county could take in revenues of $2 trillion per year (this is a conservative estimate - South Floridians love cafecito.). Let's make this happen, Messrs. Burgess and Gimenez.


Image via marlinsnewballpark.com

Read more...