Derek Jeter is the perfect face and owner for the dysfunctional Miami Marlins.

In the last quarter century, Derek Jeter won five World Series with the Yankees, cemented himself as the most popular athlete in New York, dated a Murderer’s Row of celebrities and married a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model. He played for the most famous team in the biggest city and over two decades never drew the ire of tabloids that delight in even the slightest celebrity slip-up. For anyone who doubts Jeter’s Midas touch, chew on this: He actually started a successful media company in the 2010s. Squint hard enough and there still isn’t anything objectionable about Jeter. Even those who hate him don’t really hate him.

Then there is Jeffrey Loria. Squint hard enough and his murder of one Major League Baseball franchise and slow starving of another becomes even clearer. Loria dismantled his only championship team. He misled the public for a decade to get money for a new stadium. He alienated his front offices, fired managers like his franchise was a reality show and did so with the cocksure walk of someone who knew what he was doing, not a con man who never could fake it. He habitually led the league in penny pinching and incompetence. Jeffrey Loria does not belong in the same sentence as Derek Jeter, and yet here they are, intertwined forever as the former cedes control of the Miami Marlins to the latter and the organization finally get its chance to succeed.

Nothing can change the fortunes of an organization quite like a new owner, and the partnership of Jeter, Jeb Bush and the money men behind them — and, two sources said, there are plenty of those — will rearrange the Marlins’ calculus. Maybe not instantaneously, as the fences to mend with the fans of South Florida are miles long, but for an organization that ran itself like a perpetual Jenga tower, the prospect of someone as level-headed as Jeter involving himself bodes well.



By Jeff Passan.
Full story at Yahoo News.