Le Batard: Marlins look foolish, immoral after trade

As Oscar Villarrealwilde Child once said…“The teams that the world calls immoral are teams that show the world its own shame.”

The Marlins last offseason were like a gluttonous fat man at the all-you-can-eat buffet, stacking the plate with his eyes and appetite without regard to practicality or the oncoming food coma. The team overspent assuming we’d fill the ballpark, which we didn’t, and that meant losing about $40 million in that calamity of a season. Even though management didn’t have to serial-killer slash the payroll, there were going to have to be cuts, so the team decided to take a wrecking ball to the blueprint and just start again. It is terrible for public relations and awful for fans, but they were going to cut $40 million somewhere. Unlike Micky Arison, who lost money every year he owned the Heat except last year, Jeffrey Loria doesn’t have enough money to keep losing $40 million a year even as the ballpark appreciates his and the franchise’s value. We might feel better if Jose Reyes was still here, but what’s the point of that if you are going to have to trade your pitching staff to cut costs anyway?

This was businessmen behaving like businessmen. Sports owners didn’t get rich in their cutthroat worlds by doing the moral thing. There are no charities in charge of sports teams. Although what the Marlins did feels immoral and indecent, it is up to our politicians to protect us from it instead of just assuming that people who have behaved badly before would act now in good faith. And we didn’t even get to vote. You can’t blame snakes for being snakes without putting responsibility on the zoo keepers.

And now? Well, this betrayal is going to echo and cost the Marlins paying customers. There is only one thing about this entire organization that anyone trusts today. It is Giancarlo Stanton’s bat. That’s it. Word is he didn’t want to be here long-term even before this recent mess, preferring California. If the Marlins can’t afford him, and he doesn’t want to be here, you know what that means. His value is high, his salary is cheap, and the franchise is back to its core philosophy after all that drunken spending. You will never get more prospects for Stanton than you will today. And, already surrounded by howling, how much worse can the customer hostility possibly get?