Three Questions Miami Marlins Owner Bruce Sherman Needs To Be Asked

Will the Miami Marlins ever have a payroll that approaches the top half of the league, and if not, why should fans want you to own the team?

If you've been a fan of the Miami Marlins at any point this century, there has been at least one moment (if not several) where you have stopped to ask yourself a very simple, honest question:

Why exactly does this guy own a baseball team?

From the Marlins fan perspective, it's hard not to let the negative answers spring to mind. An epic troll job of South Florida from David Samson. Rob Manfred's gross incompetence. Perhaps just a simple, long lingering curse. Those were largely Bruce Sherman specific thoughts, but there's plenty of room there for some Jeffrey Loria crossover. Just so long as we agree that some mix of nefariousness, stupidity, and divine punishment is at work.

To Sherman's credit, he does appear to genuinely like baseball. It's not as if the man faced the choice of buying a South Florida baseball team or heavily investing in tech stocks and just happened to choose very, very poorly. The honest answer could just be that he thought it'd be fun and was able to afford it. Much the same as you or I buy might buy a new video game, and exactly the same as you or I might do if we were several hundred million dollars richer and had the chance to buy the Marlins.

Yet when you're committed to spending so little, so consistently on payroll, it's hard not to get more cynical. There is always another sports car. Or yacht. Or model. Another splashy bet or investment to make. But the number of professional sport teams? That's a limited commodity, and the list that comes up for sale is downright finite- particularly in MLB. The status symbol factor looms large here. There might be plenty of richer people in the country club locker room than Bruce Sherman at any given time. MLB owners though? That's a select fraternity.

If Mr. Sherman just wants to call himself an MLB owner, maybe someone could remind him that part-owners are owners too. If he's so enamored with the Rays business model, perhaps he should sell the Marlins and use part of the proceeds to buy a small stake of the Rays. If he offers to spring for fixing the roof at Tropicana Field, maybe Rays ownership would even be inclined to agree.

Understandably, it isn't that simple. That doesn't mean someone shouldn't force Sherman to answer some tough questions about his stewardship of the team though.

The Marlins have only spent over $100 million on payroll once in the Sherman era. Put another way, there has been just one time the Marlins weren't in the bottom six under his watch. That was 2023, when the club spent $105 million per Spotrac and ranked 22nd. Just as a reminder, that team did make the playoffs. Ranking just in the 15-17 range of MLB payrolls would require an investment right around the $150 million range. Big budgets don't guarantee a championship, but they do go a long way toward guaranteeing the presence of exciting players and winning more games than you lose year in and year out.

No one is saying Sherman needs to match the Mets and Phillies, or even the Braves, regularly spending hundreds of millions. Yet is it so much to ask to regularly spend 100 million, and occasionally spend as much as the Mariners or the Twins, flirting with that $135-$150 million range?

It really shouldn't be, and if that's a deal breaker, fans have every right to ask what exactly it is that Sherman is bringing to the table. Because there really needs to be more to the answer than "Nobody loves the game more than Bruce", or "Hey, at least I'm not John Fisher".

Vague promises toward future spending, or references to all the off the field investment in analytics tend to be the answer when versions of this question are asked. Yet those future promises are just a dodge until made good upon. Protestations about off the field spending obfuscates the fact that most of the big spending teams do both- pay for top players and top baseball people.

Pressing Mr. Sherman to fully account for why Miami Marlins fans are better off with him running the team than someone else would be quite illuminating, provided he gave a real answer. If asked any of these questions, he probably wouldn't.

Here's hoping some of these questions are asked though, and fans get a chance to find out.