Derek Jeter’s Group Is Said to Have Deal to Buy Marlins – New York Times

Major League Baseball owners will meet next week in Chicago but are not expected to vote on the agreement because they will not have had enough time to evaluate it. Their next opportunity to vote on it will be in October.

In May, the baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, acknowledged that two groups were bidding for the Marlins — one led by Jeter and Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, and the other by Tagg Romney, managing partner of Solamere Capital and a son of the former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

But since then, Jeter and Bush had a falling out, leading Bush to join Romney’s group. Jorge Mas, a Miami businessman and a leader of the movement against the Castro regime in Cuba, also entered the bidding, complicating baseball’s efforts to get the team sold.

It appears that the rival bidders were unsuccessful against the lure of Sherman’s money and Jeter’s prestige.

Sherman, 69, co-founded the asset management firm Private Capital Management, based in Naples, Fla., in 1986. He retired in 2009, after Private Capital lost large sums from its bets on newspaper stocks and in Bear Stearns’s collapse.

Loria, 76, has owned the Marlins since 2002. He had previously owned the Montreal Expos, but in a complicated and controversial move, he sold the team to the 29 other M.L.B. owners and bought the Marlins for $158.5 million from John Henry. Henry then bought the Boston Red Sox.

The Marlins won the World Series in Loria’s second year of ownership but have not returned to the playoffs since. The team consistently ranks near the bottom of the league in both payroll and attendance.

But the team is still an attractive target, because of the growing value of teams across professional sports and because it moved into a new stadium in 2012, financed primarily by Miami-Dade County and the city of Miami.


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