A former Miami Marlins executive recently unloaded a lot of frustration about New York Yankees legend Derek Jeter and his failures as CEO of the Florida baseball club.
There was a great deal of fanfare when New York Yankees icon Derek Jeter was part of a group that purchased the Marlins in 2017. Bruce Sherman — the new majority owner — would immediately make an impact on the franchise by then making the Hall-of-Famer the first CEO of African-American descent in MLB history.
Even beyond the New York Yankees fan base, Derek Jeter is a revered athlete by most baseball fans after winning five World Series titles. There was a great deal of excitement about a legend of the sport being able to mold the Marlins into a powerhouse club in his image. However, it seems his ideas on how to do that and the lack of accountability from Sherman led to a disastrous situation in Miami.
On Thursday, former Marlins President David Samson spoke to Front Office Sports about what he feels went wrong for the New York Yankees great in Miami, and it seems like it was a lot. Firstly — and hilariously — Samson claims he found out about being fired after the sale via an ESPN alert on his phone and not from Jeter himself.
“I called Derek and said, ‘Hey, I just got an alert. Am I actually fired?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah, I didn’t get to you. I’m sorry,'” Samson says.
Yet, when it comes to how he actually ran the team from the start, Samson alleges that majority owner Bruce Sherman “let him do anything he wanted with absolutely no accountability.” This, in Samson’s opinion, led to years of poor and strange decisions by the New York Yankees legend over the next five years.
“He was able to bring in all his own people and he thought that everything that I did was bad. And figured he could do Costanza, which is opposite day. Anything I did, he did the opposite and assumed it would work. He assumed that he could get a bigger TV deal. He assumed he could get a big naming rights deal, that he’d get tons of season ticket holders, and that he would make the team a winning team.
“After four years, I think he realized that being a shortstop and being an executive are two totally different things … And I think he realized quickly that being a pitchman for Subway was probably going to be more up his alley than running the team every day and being accountable for that.”
– David Samson
Derek Jeter eventually, surprisingly, stepped down as CEO in 2022 and sold his 4% ownership share in the team.
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