In an unabashed fire sale, the Miami Marlins have agreed
to trade virtually every player making significant money to the Toronto Blue
Jays in exchange for younger, and cheaper, talent.Making the 1,500-mile trip north from Miami
to Toronto, along with $160 million in committed salary, is any good will
Marlins team owner Jeffrey Loria has generated since purchasing the team. The outstanding question is whether this action will trigger MLB Commissioner
Bud Selig to respond and veto this trade.
While teams have the right to trade salaries for potential,
as illustrated by the blockbuster Red Sox / Dodgers trade this past August, this maneuver by the Marlins feels entirely different. Under the rubric of full
disclosure, I’m a Red Sox fan and was thrilled the Dodgers don’t have an
accountant on staff to realize they assumed $250 million in payroll.
Despite only being around for a decade, salary dumps have already marred the Marlins’
short franchise history.Following the
1997 and 2003 seasons the Marlins ripped apart their team by unloading
virtually all of their assets as well, but those trades followed world championships and
had a different feel.This time around
there doesn’t even appear to be the pretense of improving the talent on the
field.
In the past year, Loria manipulated the city of Miami to
contribute $360 million of public funds into the construction of their $515
million ballpark, traded away a National League Rookie of the Year and three time
All-Star in Hanley Ramirez, and fired the fiery and Fidel Castro loving manager Ozzie
Guillen.Yet none of these maneuvers
seem as offensive as the latest move to enhance the team’s bottom line.Statements of exasperation and frustration
are emanating from executives from around the league as well as from the Marlins’ players left
behind.
The question is whether commissioner Bud Selig will invoke
his legal right to protect the “best interests of the game” and quash this
trade. If he does, he has legal precedent behind him. In 1976 Charles Finley, owner of
the Oakland Athletics, tried to sell three of his teams stars—Vida Blue, Rollie
Fingers, and Joe Rudi—to the Boston Red Sox for $3.5 million.Bowie Kuhn, the MLB commissioner at the time,
struck down the deal because it was “not in the best interests of baseball.”Despite a legal challenge by the MLBPA’s
Executive Director Marvin Miller, Kuhn’s legal right to block the trade was
upheld in the seminal Finley v Kuhn decision.
More recently, in December of 2011 the NBA’s commissioner David Stern
vetoed a proposed trade of Chris Paul by the New Orleans Hornets to the Los
Angeles Lakers. While the facts were
slightly different because the NBA owned the Hornets at the time Stern rejected
a trade based on what he felt was best for the league—and every owner outside
of Los Angeles hailed this decision.
Has the recent trade by the Marlins reached the level of
absurdity forcing Selig to take action?If MLB does veto this trade, has it met the threshold necessary for a Commissioner
to successfully invoke “the best interest of the game” defense under law?Stay tuned.
But you are a Red Sox fan so hardly impartial and should recuse yourself. And then you can check out what the Marlins have gotten in return. They have done better with the talent they received from Toronto then your guys did with that egregious fire sale last summer.
Loria is a disgrace but he has not acted illegally and Selig knows it. Teams who do badly often bounce their highest-paid players before a rebuild. The difference here is the stadium, not the salary dump. And that is between Loria and the citizens of Miami.
This is one of the oddities that arise when you have a monopoly business with higher capital barriers to entry. Normally the market would punish a business purposely becoming less competitive. But I guess here the Commissioner has to step in.
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