Jeffrey Harold Loria (born November 20, 1940)[2] is an American entrepreneur, author, and the former owner of the Montreal Expos (now the Washington Nationals) and Miami Marlins of Major League Baseball.
Loria attended New York City's Stuyvesant High School[7] and Yale University, where he initially took pre-med courses.
In 1965, at the age of 24, he opened his business, Jeffrey H. Loria & Co., on Manhattan's Upper East Side and wrote a book, Collecting Original Art.
Premier Lucien Bouchard said that he could not support using public funds to build ballparks when the province was being forced to shut down hospitals.
In 2002, as part of an orchestrated move with Bud Selig and then-Marlins owner John W. Henry, Loria sold the Expos to a partnership of the other 29 major league clubs for $120 million.
Before the stadium deal was in place, the team shed star players to pare down payroll to among baseball's lowest in 2006, and was given permission to explore options for relocating.
[18] A deal with the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County was eventually approved and the Marlins agreed to contribute $155 million toward the construction of a new retractable roof stadium.
This led local and national sportswriters, as well as Marlins fans, to criticize Loria's stated intentions of building a competitive team.
[19] Although the Marlins faced the threat of boycotts during the 2013 season from local residents, politicians, and sportswriters, Loria defended the November 2012 trade with the Blue Jays.
He claimed that despite the Marlins' hefty payroll in 2012, the fans did not sell out the facility as imagined and that the organization was not winning and needed to "take a new course" in order to do so.
[20] In April 2013, Loria reportedly had Ricky Nolasco and José Fernández switch the games of a doubleheader in which they were scheduled to pitch, violating clubhouse protocol.
[21] In July 2013, hitting coach Tino Martinez, who had been handpicked by Loria, resigned following allegations that he verbally and physically assaulted players, including Chris Valaika.
In February 2017, it was reported that Loria had been in negotiations to sell the Marlins to the family of Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump, and that the parties came to "a handshake deal".
[32] Loria still runs his art dealership, and is an honorary member of the board of overseers of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York.