Here you go, from South Florida CEO in April of 2003:

 

Play Ball

 

Baseball Dreams

 

When New York art dealer and baseball aficionado Jeffrey Loria bought the Marlins last year, South Florida fans had all but abandoned the team. Now Loria is not only rebuilding a roster of solid players, he is also reconstructing the team's relationship with its home base. Will the fans play ball?

By Jeff Zbar

 

It's a glorious March day at Jupiter's Roger Dean Stadium ? the kind of day baseball is made for. The sun is shining brightly as players mill about on the field of their sprawling practice facility. The crack of bats punctuates the play list coming from the PA system: a mix of hip-hop, Latin and country-western music, fitting for players and north Palm Beach County locals alike.

 

Fans bedecked in Red Sox red and Marlins teal also amble about, hotdogs layered in ketchup, pretzels slathered in mustard. The beer is cold. The buzz in the air is palpable. It's spring training.

 

Amid it all is a 62-year-old with a boyish grin who is plainly in his glory. Jeffrey Loria, owner of the Florida Marlins and avid fan of the game, is talking strategy with manager Jeff Torborg behind the batting cage that is perched over home plate. Not owner to employee, but fan to manager. As the two talk, up walks Kevin Millar, the former Marlins and current Red Sox pitcher. He wise cracks and the three start to laugh.

 

Loria breaks away to mingle with fans. An older Red Sox fan starts talking team dreams and hopes for the season. "Who're you?" the man asks. "I'm the owner of the Marlins," says Loria, who repeats the name in a playful Boston accent: "The Mah-lins."

 

About 100 yards away from the owner is the team president, Loria's stepson, David Samson. Sitting on a second floor deck outside his office overlooking left field, Samson is as enamored with the business of baseball as his stepdad is of the game itself. They seem a perfect match: Don't talk to Samson about the joys of going to baseball games as a kid, he'd rather talk Knicks basketball ? if any sport at all ? while Loria prefers to skirt front-office chat and go directly to talk about the team.

 

"My ability to be a fan has increased exponentially since I got into the game," Samson admits. "But it's my responsibility to run the business."

 

Together, these two ? a New York art dealer and a New York wealth management exec ? are the unlikely would-be saviors of South Florida baseball. With only four years in the business of big league baseball they took over the Marlins in the spring of 2002, hoping to give the fickle local audience something to be proud of ? and to spend money on. This, their sophomore season in Florida, could be the breakout year. Success or failure will be measured as much in the stands as on the field. And both men know it.

 

Trajectory of a Dream

At 62, Loria can trace his love of baseball back to his first Yankees game. When the Boston Red Sox logged the last out, a six-year-old Loria asked his father if that was all.

 

Hardly. Loria went on to play second base for his Manhattan high school ? though any hope of making a college squad was quashed when bum knees kept him from moving up. Yet, baseball was always there, at least from a fan's perspective. Professionally, with a degree in art history from Yale and an MBA from Columbia, Loria's first job was with Sears, Roebuck & Co., in the department store's fledgling art-buying program. By 24, he had published several books on art. In 1965, he opened Jeffrey H. Loria & Co., a private art dealership he still runs on New York's Upper East Side. Over the ensuing decades he became wealthy by catering to private clients, dealing in high-end art by the likes of Pablo Picasso and sculptor Henry Moore.

 

For his part, Samson, 35, can trace his taste for baseball to a day in 1998. That's when Loria negotiated to buy the Montreal Expos ? and lured Samson from his job as a wealth strategist with Morgan Stanley in New York to be the team's executive vice president.

 

Actually, the Marlins are Loria's third shot at team ownership. He was the owner of the Triple-A Oklahoma City 89ers. The team won the 1992 league championship, and Loria was named executive of the year by the league.

The minors weren't big enough for Loria, however, who sold the team in 1993. Six years later, when the opportunity came up to acquire the Montreal Expos for about $120 million, he entered the big leagues.

But Canada was a different world for baseball. Revenues and attendance were weak. Loria couldn't negotiate English-language TV rights in the French-dominant province. To make matters worse, while the team collected revenues in Canadian dollars, players had to be paid in US currency. "Things fell apart," says one baseball writer.

Then, in November 2001, the league voted to pursue "contraction" ? a euphemism for eliminating the two worst-performing teams from the league. The Expos were one of the targets. While substantial legal barriers still stood in the way of such a contraction, Loria didn't want to wait around to see if his team would be shut down, and he didn't want to lose his ties to the bigs.

 

So he negotiated a deal that called for Major League Baseball (MLB) to buy the Expos from him, in turn allowing him to buy the Marlins. MLB paid him the $120 million he had shelled out for the Expos, then loaned him another $38.5 million to cover Marlins owner John Henry's $158.5 million asking price. This freed Henry to buy the Boston Red Sox, and kept the Expos alive for a future relocation to a US city. Loria was left with the expense of operating the Marlins, and with the task of helping underwrite a new ballpark for South Florida within the next five years. Under the terms of the deal, if no new ballpark is built, part of the loan will be forgiven ? since the absence of a dedicated park will make it much tougher to turn a profit.

 

A Fighting Chance?

In South Florida, where football rules, other pro sports franchises tend to struggle at the turnstile. The Marlins are no exception. Samson claims the team was left with a mere 250 season ticket-holders when Loria bought it. Last year, the team was outdrawn by minor league squads in Memphis, Sacramento and even a Mexican league team.

 

But ask locals which pro teams they follow, and some 50 percent from the tri-county area say they regularly follow the Marlins. That's according to a poll commissioned each year by Sports & Sponsorships, a Miami Beach-based sports marketing firm. Among the 600 people polled ? 200 in each of the three counties ? Marlins followers were second only to the Dolphins (58 percent) and significantly ahead of the Heat (32 percent) and the Panthers (13 percent).

 

"The research shows the fans are there," says agency president Scott Becher, who also consulted with the Marlins under former owner John Henry. "Just because someone doesn't attend a live game, it doesn't mean they're not a fan. The Marlins have a tremendous fan base in South Florida, but until those fans feel like they're getting better treatment from ownership in the form of a competitive team, they're not going to spend the money to go to the game."

 

Loria and Samson can trace their fans' woes back to the weeks following the 1997 World Series. Still euphoric from winning 108 games and the trophy, players and fans awoke weeks later to the news that team owner H. Wayne Huizenga was paring down the team's $86 million payroll. Before the next season, virtually all of the star players who had taken the team to the top were gone.

 

After the roster cuts, there came the fire sale of the team to John Henry, a couple of cellar-dweller seasons and a rash of threats that the team would be moved if a new stadium were not built with public funds. "Marlins fans had their hearts torn out," Becher says, and Loria "inherited a dysfunctional fan-team relationship."

 

Now Management intends to rebuild that relationship, by improving both the team's performance and its marketing, which are intimately linked. As Becher notes, "You can market all you want. They've already heard the hyperbole on net promises. Winning is the only form of marketing that will put butts in seats."

 

For his part, Loria has hardly been up to bat. After all, he took possession of the team just after players reported for spring training last year. Nonetheless, going into this season the team has some 4,000 regular season ticket-holders, a figure which they expect to rise 20 percent by the end of the current season.

 

"My name doesn't start with 'H' like the previous regimes, who did what they wanted to do," Loria says. "We had nothing to do with the previous regime." Nonetheless, the challenges loom large.

 

Doomed Without a Dome?

One of Loria's biggest conundrums is one which stymied Henry: where ? and how ? to build a dedicated ballpark. In the end, Henry's inability to secure a public commitment for the lion's share of funding for a new stadium drove him to leave the area in frustration. The problem is that, without a domed facility to call its own, the Marlins are at a disadvantage. Some local commentators, such as Sun-Sentinel sports columnist Mike Berardino, believe that the Marlins have little chance of surviving in South Florida without one.

 

The problem is multifold. First there is the weather. Forget the twin rainy seasons that bracket the summer; the heat alone keeps too many fans out of Pro Player Stadium. And then there is the inability to leverage a stadium for revenue. Because Huizenga owns the Pro, the Marlins cannot reap the full rewards of sponsorship, luxury suite sales, or even parking concessions. Location is another issue: Henry wanted a downtown Miami stadium, near Cuban neighborhoods where baseball is a major fascination.

 

Dedicated stadium or no, however, the Marlins have little choice but to go the full nine innings. MLB won't let them relocate, and contraction isn't an issue until 2007, when the current collective bargaining agreement with players expires. And they can't sell ? except at a big loss. So while they might not have intended to stay in South Florida permanently, Loria and Samson must make the best of the situation.

 

On their end, the priority is to first rebuild the team ? and make it a more important part of the South Florida psyche ? before worrying about a stadium.

 

For starters, they brought in an experienced new front office staff. They stirred up the league by making a failed bid for Rockies pitcher Mike Hampton. They shed $30 million from their payroll by ditching outfielder Preston Wilson and catcher Charles Johnson, while retaining well-known names like infielders Derrek Lee and Mike Lowell. They picked up Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez, a veteran catcher perfect for the team's young roster. They signed only one player to a contract longer than a year ? cutting out any need for insurance payments to cover the possibilities of payouts to injured players. Today, they stand at around $48 million in payroll, half of what it once was.

 

"I don't think they have anything up their sleeve. There is no viable escape route," Berardino says. "To their credit, they've taken one broadside after another and made missteps. I expected this to be another bloodletting, and it wasn't. They've made additions to the infrastructure that tell me they are in it for the long haul. They believe they can win their division, and I give them credit for tilting at that windmill."

 

In The Spotlight

Both Loria and Samson admit that the bright lights of baseball are a world away from their formerly private careers. Close friend and fellow New York art dealer Maxwell Davidson III feels for Loria. The two met 40 years ago at Sears, and have been close ever since, hitting Yankees games in their younger years and taking in a few spring training games this March.

 

Maxwell remembers the heat Loria took from the press in Montreal. The people there did not appreciate Loria, he says, and did not understand that he had the makings of a great owner ? intelligent, focused, committed. He hopes South Florida will be kinder and gentler. "They crapped all over him in Montreal and I hate them for it," Maxwell says. "But the Montreal players thought he was terrific."

 

So, too, do the Marlins, it seems. In the locker room, pitcher Brad Penny calls Loria over to meet some of his friends from Oklahoma. Second-baseman Luis Castillo still sports the medallion Loria picked up for him at the Vatican last year after his 35-game hitting streak.

 

But that's not what people see ? the owner cutting up with his players, as much a fan as any paying spectator. Instead, the press and public took pot shots at the team last year for not marketing the product. What was there to market, Samson asks? By the time new management arrived, it was too late to even create opening day programs. No ads were on the airwaves; the team even ran out of hotdogs on opening day.

 

Not this year. Management has taken the team on the road. The caravan made appearances at Little Havana's Calle Ocho and the Doral golf tournament. The team stocked up on 30,000 hotdogs to give away free on opening day.

 

They're even having some fun. Thousands of Ryan Dempster bobblehead dolls sit in storage, ordered just before the team traded the pitcher to the Cincinnati Reds. So the team will hold "Ryan Dempster Bobblehead Doll Day" when the Reds come to town in May. The next day, they'll hold Juan Encarnacion glove day ? for the player the team picked up in the Dempster trade.

 

"When you have time to have an off season, you have time to plan and execute," Samson says.

Michael Goldberg sees the fun. The team's account rep at Zimmerman & Partners Advertising, Goldberg is working with Loria, Samson and team marketing VP Sean Flynn to create a campaign that, hopefully, will rekindle the flame that fan and team once shared. The latest ads speak of the team's revival. "Get back in the game," the campaign begs. The $2.5 million effort will range from TV and radio spots to print and billboard ads to dorsal fins strapped to the tops of cabs.

 

The message promotes the points important to Loria ? speed, passion, youth and intensity. One billboard ad sports the image of a pitched baseball burning the board in half. A TV spot shows Marlins pitchers demolishing opposing team bobblehead dolls. "It's pretty simple," Goldberg says. "The mandate is to reinvent the brand to create a love affair with this market."

 

The marketing goes beyond advertising. One of the wilder promotions is the sponsorship by Budweiser and Sunshine Pools of three, eight-person hot tubs in the stadium. Actually, they will not be hot tubs, per se, but large tubs filled with cool water and perched in a tropical, beach-like setting behind the home-team bullpen. More down to earth, "Ambassadors" will greet and thank fans at the gates before and after each game. And each week, Samson's schedule includes speaking events before local business and civic groups, spreading the word that Marlins' management is serious about success. "We're trying to win fans one at a time," Samson says.

Because the team has a roster of young players who are shy ? if not unknowing ? of the media, the team hired RBB Public Relations to handle their interaction with the public and press. The firm immediately set up media training for all the players. Attendance hit 100 percent. "It was very well received," says RBB partner Ed Gilhuly.

The public relations push is already paying off. February's Fan Fest at Pro Player Stadium drew more than 10,000 people. The team now has a slick season-ticket brochure featuring fan reward programs. After being stagnant for a year, "they're being visible," says one local sports writer. "The questions now are much more about baseball than if the team is staying."

 

That's just what Loria and Samson hope ? that the team will play hard and be warmly received, that it will find success on the field and in the media, and that by October, it will be in the post-season.

 

"Jeffrey and I will go down in history," Samson says. "If we fail here, we will be the third failure in this market. Or, we will be the ones who make baseball prosper in South Florida ? that two people with high hopes failed, and we hit a home run."

As the two talk, up walks Kevin Millar, the former Marlins and current Red Sox pitcher.

 

That cowboy can do it all

If they stay the course set last year they will be successful in South Florida. Just look at the progress since last April when this was written. They met their season ticket goals, and will surpass them this year.

 

If we get a stadium deal, then there is no doubt the turn-around will be fully underway. But even if the stadium doesn't happen by March, that doesn't mean they won't find another way to keep the momentum building. And with that, a new home for the Marlins will be inevitable.

That cowboy can do it all

yea, he knows how to "cowboy" up :cowboy whew!!! Ye haw!! :deadhorse