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?

South Florida CEO, April, 2003 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.

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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."

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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.