Marlins’ Loria could be sports’ worst owner ever

When Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss died last week, it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to his place among the best owners in the history of sports.

Perhaps it’s only fitting that the disastrous public reappearance of Jeffrey Loria renewed debate this week over who is the worst.

In the city of Miami, there is no debate. The Marlins owner is so reviled he might want to avoid going to his year-old stadium lest he find a mob ready to run him out of town.

His payroll is so low, the team he will trot out Opening Day would have trouble competing in the Pacific Coast League, much less the National League.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are on the hook for a $634 million stadium that might have more tropical fish swimming around inside than fans in the stands.

If he’s not the worst owner ever, it’s only because there’s a lot of competition for the title. The late owner of the Cincinnati Reds, Marge Schott, comes to mind. So does Robert Irsay, who fled Baltimore in the middle of the night and took the city’s beloved NFL Colts with him.

But Loria is in the top five.

His decision this week to embark on a public relations campaign to convince fans he was right to trade the team’s top talent — Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Josh Johnson, among others — because he wanted to make the Marlins better, reeked of arrogance. It didn’t work mostly because Loria acted the way he always acts — like he’s the smartest person in the room.

Maybe he is. This is a guy, after all, who parlayed a small investment in the Montreal Expos into ownership of a team and a new stadium in Miami.

He got handouts from Major League Baseball for years and got lucky with a World Series winner a decade ago. Now he’s got fans paying the freight — and rewarded them with a team so devoid of talent that the payroll is expected to be $45 million this season, the lowest in the majors.

The trouble with smart people, though, is that sometimes they begin to believe their own news releases. That seems to be the case with Loria, who hired a high-powered public relations firm to try to mend his image in South Florida and, more importantly, convince people they should spend more of their money at his ballpark.

The campaign began with his open letter to the citizens of Miami defending everything he’s done and promising good times around the next corner.

“We’re in this together, and I humbly ask that we start fresh, watch us mature quickly as a ball club, and root for the home team in 2013,” Loria wrote.

That went over about as well as former manager Ozzie Guillen praising Fidel Castro in Little Havana last season. But it got worse when Loria met the media, not all of whom seemed to be on board with the idea that the Marlins need to make their owner more money before they can be competitive.

Asked at one point if he had pulled a con job on Miami residents, Loria bristled.

“A con job? I’m not even going to answer that,” he said.

Actually, con job might be an understatement. He convinced local businessmen and politicians not only to build him a new ballpark but guarantee him almost every dime generated from it.

He took on payroll because it was part of the deal to get the ballpark but backloaded the contracts so he didn’t risk much of his own money doing it.

Then he dumped the new players he signed before the year was over. True, they didn’t perform as expected, but the contracts were structured in a way that seemed suspicious.

Now Loria is raking in more money from MLB’s new television deals than he is paying players. He’s guaranteed tens of millions in profits even if his team doesn’t win 50 games. And if he’s not the most popular person in South Florida, well, so what.

Loria won’t even commit to signing the team’s only remaining star. Giancarlo Stanton isn’t eligible for arbitration, and Loria said he wants to see him play another year before deciding to pay him major money.

Apparently the 71 home runs Stanton hit during the past two years weren’t convincing enough.

Fans are reacting to all this the only way they know how — by refusing to buy tickets to watch an inferior product. The pitch Loria made to get his new stadium was that baseball fans would come out in droves if they had a proper ballpark with a retractable roof. But the turnstile count last year was just 1.4 million, a million below expectations. This year will be even worse, with season-ticket sales, so far, not even half the 12,000 sold for the inaugural season. Not even the lure of watching fish swimming in aquariums behind home plate seems to be helping.

One newspaper called Loria the most hated man in baseball, and with Frank McCourt no longer controlling the Dodgers and Alex Rodriguez on the disabled list, it’s hard to argue with that.

No, Loria might not yet be the worst owner ever. But give him time and he might get there.

Tim Dahlberg is a Las Vegas-based national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org or http://twitter.com/timdahlberg.