Marlins Being Sued By Would-Be Owners
By Kluger, Kaplan, Silverman, Katzen & Levine, P.L. February 22, 2012
Filed under Really?! The Miami Marlins are being sued for not “selling” the team for $10 Million. Was David Samson kidding? Most likely. And now, they are dealing with a lawsuit.
Read the unbelievable story from Baseball Nation here.
By Jeff Sullivan – Editor
It would be absurd to think that the Marlins would be sold for $10 million. Absurd! And yet, here we are, with a lawsuit on our hands.
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Feb 22, 2012 – David Samson is the president of the Miami Marlins. In 2008, David Samson was the president of the Florida Marlins. In February of that year, Samson served as the auctioneer at the Fourth Annual Awards Banquet at the Diplomat Country Club & Spa. It was a team function, see, and an auction was a big part of it. To begin the auction, Samson put the Marlins up for sale, available to bidders at a starting price of $10 million. Samson was probably joking. Somebody bid. That somebody was apparently not joking.
And now that somebody is suing the Marlins. Omeranz & Landsma Corporation submitted the bid. It was the only bid. A contract of some sort was subsequently drawn up. The Marlins then failed to honor the contract by not actually being sold for $10 million. So the corporation is suing for “damages”. And also for “such other and further relief” as the court deems “just and proper”. This is legal terminology for “we want money and goodies”. I have a friend in law school so I can parse this stuff like nobody’s business.
Obviously, Samson was not seriously offering the Marlins for a $10 million starting price. David Samson has his flaws, but “complete and utter incompetence” is not one of them. However, without having seen the alleged contract entered into after the Omeranz & Landsma bid, it’s fun to let the imagination run wild and think that the Marlins might have gotten themselves into a pickle here. Since I don’t actually know anything about law, I don’t know how courts differentiate legitimate contracts from facetious contracts. Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. Maybe the Marlins inserted specific language, and maybe they didn’t.
Read the rest of the story here.