Quint's Corner

This version of Quint's Corner offered me the opportunity to speak with Joel Mael, Vice Chairman of the Florida Marlins.

Dov Quint: You work for the Marlins, yet live in New York. Who did you root for growing up and who do you root for now? Was there ever a conflict between work and being a fan?

Joel Mael: I actually grew up in Boston and was a Red Sox fan my entire life until 1999, when we got into baseball; first with the Expos and now with the Marlins. I was born in Montreal so it was easier to become an Expos fan and it was hard breaking away from my childhood connections and loyalties to the Red Sox, but over time I was able to do it.

DQ: Especially hard over the last couple of years, I'm sure (with the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007).

JM: I was very happy for my friends and relatives who waited a long time in Boston.

DQ: How exactly did you come to the position you occupy today as Vice Chairman of the Marlins?

JM: The Principal Owner, Jeffrey Loria who also has a connection to YU, is on the Board of Cardozo (YU's Graduate School of Law) and his daughter just recently graduated from Ferkauf (YU's Graduate School of Psychology). I met him in 1991 and he was a very successful art dealer who had a passion of buying a baseball team. I worked with him for about eight years and we bid on two or three different teams. Jeffrey was primarily focused on the baseball side and I would look at the business side. We bid on a few teams and we were finally successful in 1999 when we bought the Montreal Expos and then a few years later Jeffrey was able to swap the Expos for the Marlins.

DQ: For someone like you who has such an inside track on the team's finances, explain to me a little bit about the up and down competitiveness of the Marlins.

JM: In terms of the strategy, there was actually a survey that came out this

week looking at teams since 1995, whose wins exceeded their average payroll from the median. It showed that the Marlins were number one in being the farthest from the median average salary with the most wins in a season in the last ten years. The least successful were the New York Mets. They were the team most over the average median payroll and had the fewest wins to show for it.

DQ: Tell me a little bit about the recent stadium deal the Marlins completed?

JM: The stadium deal has been signed up with the county and the city. We do have a binding agreement on it. Like every one of these deals that preceded us, there are definitely going to be some bumps in the road and hopefully we will be able to overcome all of them. It took us about five years to get this deal done. The two prior ownership groups of the Marlins collectively spent four or five additional years trying to get a baseball only stadium built in South Florida. It's still less time then the Minnesota Twins have taken to get their stadium deal done, but it's awfully close. What are some of the bumps in the road? There's a lawsuit out there trying to block the deal, there's a disagreement between the city and the county over whose police officers will control the facility, we still have to get clean environmental studies on the site, there's an issue with some of the county commissioners that they want to see solved in the final documents three months from now relating to our use of minority and small businesses being hired to work on the stadium. So there's always bumps in the road, but you hope that with the overall agreement and that with everybody committed to the project you can get it all the way through.

DQ: What does this mean for baseball in South Florida?

JM: This is really a re-launch. We're moving from a football stadium which is in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. We are moving it south to Miami so we probably will lose some of our fan base that is further north in Palm Beach County. On the other hand, we are hopeful that we will pick up fans that are to the south. But the critical issue of the re-launch is that we are now going to have a retractable roof stadium. For anybody who's been in Florida during the months of June, July, and August, as definite as taxes, it pours every day either from three to five or four to six, and even though we don't have a lot of rainouts, it really puts a damper on people who are looking out their window at five o'clock and saying, "maybe we should go to a ballgame tonight." By having a retractable roof we are guaranteeing for every fan that, no matter what, there will be a game that takes place.

DQ: Why the re-branding to Miami Marlins?

JM: That was actually something that was insisted upon by the city of Miami as part of the deal. We did not feel as strongly about it but we were happy to work with them on it. From our standpoint though, we think it's positive as well because again it lets us do a re-launch and a re-branding which is really helpful, we think, in the long run.

DQ: Would Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis still be Marlins if the stadium deal were done before the off-season? Did the absence of the stadium deal have anything to do with trading them?

JM: We look at trades like this and we've always looked at things from a perspective; from a baseball perspective and from an economic perspective. Our economics will not change until we are actually in the new stadium or possibly the year before as people want to have priority in picking seats in the new stadium assuming we do a good job of marketing it prior to opening.

DQ: Joe Girardi managed the Marlins in 2006 before winning Manager of the Year and being fired that same off-season. Give Yankee fans a little preview of what kind of manager Joe will be for them.

JM: All I would say is that Joe, I thought, was a terrific manager on the field. He worked well with the players, he had them prepared and he worked hard with them, and he had a lot of respect in the clubhouse from those people. I think Joe never fully made the transition at least when he was with us from player to management. When you are the manager of a team, your responsibilities are far behind just inside the clubhouse and you need to work with everybody else in the organization and hopefully, over time, Joe will be able to achieve that.

DQ: What kind of challenges have you personally faced throughout your professional career being an Orthodox Jew?

JM: Since I've been in the workforce a lot longer before baseball, I honestly have to say that I've had little or no challenges. Sometimes it's tough. In the year that we made our World Series run (2003) and when we won and there were games on Shabbos and Yom Tov that I wasn't able to watch or go to, that was more frustrating; but I wouldn't call it a challenge. The people that I work with are incredibly respectful of my time as it relates to being a frum Jew. They could not be more accommodating in making sure that I have food to eat and the challenges haven't been a lot. As a matter of fact, I'll usually have a call with (Marlins President) David Samson every Saturday night and invariably he turns to me and he says: "That's it. I'm becoming religious; everything happens on Shabbos." It's funny that some of the biggest negotiations or problems or issues that came up on the business side, many of them did happen on Shabbos and it's just interesting to see. I think everyone has realized that 25 hours does not make or break almost anything.