By Evan Weiner

March 13, 2008

(Cooper City, FL) -- It appears Major League Baseball’s number one problem going into the 2008 season has been solved. Jeffrey Loria’s Florida Marlins franchise will be getting a new $609 million stadium that will likely open in 2011 if all goes according to plan. The city of Miami will put up about 78 percent of the cost of the facility that will replace the Orange Bowl and Loria’s ownership group will get just about every penny generated in the facility once it is opened. Miami will also be responsible for the infrastructure needed for the stadium, including putting in sewers and making sure the roads leading into the facility are adequate and that cost will be in the multi-million dollar range.

So ends the saga of getting a new Miami area baseball park built unless former Philadelphia Eagles owners and Miami area car dealer Norman Braman is successful in his lawsuit asking a court to stop the plans because it takes money away from a program that is designed to improve the “blight” in Miami’s downtown area.

Lawsuits have a way of tying up projects. Just ask New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner whose plan to build a Brooklyn arena for his NBA has been stalled by litigation. If Braman cannot stop the Miami-Loria deal, then the city will have an MLB until 2046.

The Florida Marlins franchise has been a drag on MLB since Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga was granted a franchise on June 10, 1991. It seems that MLB was convinced that the Miami area could support a team based on a Baltimore Orioles-New York Yankees exhibition game at Joe Robbie Stadium during the 1991 Spring Training season that drew more than 60,000. Huizenga also had ties to baseball owners through his Blockbuster company.

MLB was not necessarily looking to expand in the late 1980s or early 1990s except for one pesky problem. Colorado Senator Tim Wirth along with Florida Senator Connie Mack III thought MLB should have teams in Colorado and Florida and like many Senators before them, Wirth and Mack threatened to introduce legislation that would lift MLB’s Anti-Trust Exemption.

The 1993 expansion to the Miami area and Denver was not easy for MLB. Denver’s finances fell apart and the bid from interested parties in Tampa Bay didn’t excite MLB owners. Huizenga though was different. He had the means, the stadium, even if it was built for Miami Dolphins football, and most importantly, MLB was looking to expand its presence in Latin America and felt a Miami-area based team would be the gateway to the Caribbean and South America.

Miami had a large Cuban community, which liked baseball, and other baseball oriented Hispanic groups and Miami was close enough to baseball hotbeds in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Venezuela and that the new Miami franchise would become “Latin America’s Team.” That was the theory at the time and the Miami Hispanic community would be the foundation for Marlins support in the Miami area.

The best-laid plans don’t always work out. The Cuban community like the rest of the Miami area has never really embraced the Marlins. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale business community depends on tourism, which is not a good business to rely upon for major league sports along with a lot of senior citizens. Huizenga also purchased an NHL expansion franchise in 1993 and the NBA had recently put a team in the new Miami Arena, which was antiquated almost the day it was opened as it did not have enough luxury boxes and club seats. The University of Miami football program and the Miami Dolphins had been mainstays in South Florida along with some MLB teams who had spring training facilities in the area including the Yankees in Fort Lauderdale and the Orioles in Miami. The Miami market suddenly became overcrowded.

Whether a new stadium can wean the Marlins franchise off of MLB revenue sharing is unknown. Loria’s Marlins do get nice sized checks from well to do teams because the team doesn’t really sell many tickets despite winning World Championships in 1997 and 2003. After winning the titles, two different owners, Huizenga and Loria traded away high priced players to reduce payroll and fans responded by not buying tickets.

Huizenga’s fire sale after 1997 was unusual and not easy to explain. The baseball team probably did lose money however Huizenga owned the stadium, sold the naming rights to the stadium and kept all of the revenue generated by the Marlins from ticket sales, concessions and parking. Huizenga also had a piece of the cable TV network that showed Marlins games. There was no way he could have been losing millions of dollars when the entire Huizenga portfolio is examined. He controlled every penny that was generated in the stadium from Marlins and Dolphins games along with other stadium events.

He eventually sold the Marlins to John Henry, a New York Yankees minority owner, and gave Henry a poor stadium deal in terms of revenues generated from concessions and parking for Marlins games which forced Henry to go to the Florida legislature looking for money to build a new Marlins stadium. Henry failed, becoming the second Marlins owner to strike out with Tallahassee lawmakers in attempting to get funding for a stadium. Huizenga realized almost immediately that a baseball and football team could no longer co-exist in a stadium because of the ways revenues have to be generated in a facility. Baseball and football teams require different sightlines for high revenue seating which owners began figuring out in the late 1960s after municipalities put up money for multi-use facilities.

The Dolphins-Marlins and the Oakland A’s-Raiders are the only two situations where teams share a stadium left and A’s owner Lewis Wolff has plans to move his franchise to Fremont, California in a baseball owner facility with the next few years if he can get approval from Fremont officials.

Hnery was removed from the scene in 2002 in a deal engineered by MLB which saw Henry and his associates purchase the Boston Red Sox, Fenway Park and the majority interest in the New England Sports Network from the Yawkey Trust, Loria bought the Marlins from Henry and sold his ownership of the Montreal Expos to his fellow MLB owners. Loria had failed in his effort to get a new stadium built in Montreal and almost immediately began his quest for a new stadium once he gained control of the South Florida franchise.

Loria was unsuccessful in getting Florida state money for his venture and finally hit pay dirt last fall after Miami officials decided to fund the project. Loria once threatened to take his franchise to San Antonio, Texas and met with Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman to talk about possibly moving to the gambling oasis in the Nevada desert. Goodman was convinced Loria was very interested in relocating the team but neither San Antonio nor Las Vegas has the cable TV money or the corporate dollars to support 81 baseball games.

Even with a planned stadium, the greater Miami area has a housing problem with people looking to sell their homes and Florida tourism dipped in 2007 although that could change in the future. Miami officials are giving away the store knowing that Miami will never be able to compete with New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston in generating high levels of revenue to keep competitive teams on the field annually.

In 1991, MLB was looking to reach out to the Caribbean and Latin America. MLB no longer needs Miami to be its gateway to the Caribbean franchise, a good many MLB franchises offer dual language telecasts and broadcasts and games are available internationally. But MLB officials identified getting a new stadium built in Miami as its number one priority and it appears the long saga to get a stadium built is over, unless the former Philadelphia Eagles owner Norman Braman gets one more sports victory, a win in court over the city of Miami to stop the Marlins stadium from being built.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com, eweiner@mcn.tv