With Day 1 of the 6,456 day baseball season approaching quickly, young players are busting their asses to try to make opening day rosters, while the savvy veterans are trying just hard enough to make sure they don’t split their pants on routine fly balls. But something that we don’t hear a lot about in the MLB preseason is how the owners prepare, so I thought I’d take this chance to check in with everyone’s favorite owner, Jeffrey Loria, to see how he’s getting ready for the 2013 season.

Loria’s Miami Marlins already had a pretty tumultuous offseason, as he traded the team’s highest paid players after just one season in the brand new stadium, which he built with taxpayer money after promising to sign high-priced talent. That led to fans demanded that Loria sell the team, which he won’t do, and he tried to quell the turbulent waters of hatred by promising the team’s most loyal fans that everything would be okay.

Translated: The Marlins are suing two longtime season ticket holders.

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The Miami Marlins invited their fans to their special Winter Warm-Up event on Saturday, presumably with cards that read, “Giancarlo Stanton may hate us, but he’s still here”, and it went about as well as you’d expect. That picture above, tweeted by the Palm Beach Post’s Marlins beat writer Joe Capozzi, shows the entire line of people waiting to purchase single game tickets when they went on sale at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Four whole people. To put that into perspective, here’s a picture of the line for New York Yankees tickets*.

The good news is that season ticket sales were reportedly only down 4% from last season, which is a surprise considering the Marlins traded away the team’s biggest stars only a month ago. But perhaps fans remain optimistic because they think that maligned owner Jeffrey Loria is finally going to cave to his villainous public perception and sell the team so that someone more concerned with building a winning franchise can take over and reverse the ongoing humiliation.

Tough titties, folks, because Loria doesn’t give a fish fart.

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Remember earlier this year when a dozen or so Miami Dolphins fans showed up to Joe Robbie Pro Player Sun Life their stadium to protest the ongoing employment of general manager Jeff Ireland and everyone was like, “Awwwww, those poor fans think they can make Stephen Ross make good decisions”? Well, Miami Marlins fans just made those Phins fans and their “Fireland” signs look like the million man march.

With news today that the blockbuster trade between the Miami Marlins and Toronto Blue Jays has been finalized, fans of South Florida’s embattled baseball franchise flocked to their year-old stadium to express their disdain with owner Jeffrey Loria for trading away half of their team for a group of players that doesn’t even include the Blue Jays’ top prospect. And as anyone would have expected, you could count the Marlins fans protesting on one hand.

But commissioner Bud Selig ain’t care, because this trade is in the best interest of something, apparently.

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If you didn’t see enough of it last night as the news initially broke, you’re going to see plenty of columns, editorials and fiery rants today about how Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is a scumbag because he is willingly killing his second baseball franchise because he’s horrible at what he does. And many of them will be great – I like this effort by Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan and this more subtle rundown by Deadspin – because as much as writers, analysts and experts love to argue about every little meaningless thing in sports, hatred for Loria runs deep within the majority. Jeffrey Loria destroyed the Montreal Expos and now he is destroying the Miami Marlins. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

So why? Why did the Marlins trade Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, John Buck, Emilio Bonifacio and Mark Buehrle to the Toronto Blue Jays for Yunel Escobar and several prospects that don’t even include Toronto’s best? Was it a brilliant move to clear money? Was it an admittance of mistakes in even signing Reyes and Buehrle in the first place? Was it just the same old fire sale that we’ve come to expect from the Marlins? Or is it more likely the story of a man under investigation by the SEC for allegedly fleecing the city of Miami in the construction of a new baseball stadium that he couldn’t even fill with a stable of stars because he already created a product so tainted within the community that people refuse to buy in until his stink is washed away?

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One of The Dugout’s favorite recurring characters over the last seven years (holy crap) has been art dealer and owner of the Florida Miami Marlins Jeffrey Loria. He’s created championship teams on minimum wage, he looks like the lovechild of John Lithgow and The Great Pumpkin and he wears sunglasses with colored lenses because that’s the kind of thing cool millionaires do. He’s also sort of a son of a bitch, and the kind of guy who can be completely racist without ever really being racist at all.

Anyway, at some point between then and now, the Miami Marlins turned into a financial contender. They’ve got new uniforms, a new stadium, a new name … they’ve signed big name free agents and positioned themselves as a legitimate, unsurprising contender in the National League. Previous rationalization led me to just assume Loria had gotten a concussion and his friends were too afraid to bring it up, but it turns out I’ve got a better explanation.

Today’s Dugout is after the jump.

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Yesterday, we shared with you the news that beloved (cough) Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen has parted ways with the organization because he couldn’t fly to Spain on their dime and wanted a bigger boat. In the Bard’s own words, by way of the Chicago Sun-Times:

“If I leave here, I will say, ‘I leave here because I want to make my [bleeping] money,’ ” he said. “You know why? Because no [bleeping] fans, no [bleeping] Jerry or [bleeping] anybody is going to take care of my grandkids and put me in a 62-foot boat. That’s why there’s free agency.’’

The Dugout has been on a brief hiatus while I was away on vacation and/or readjusting to the rigors of going to work every day in my underwear, so please enjoy this super-sized edition featuring the entire Ozzie Guillen saga, from his announcement of free agency to his Floridian journey and all the way back to Chicago, where the managers flow like wine. If you get concerned about the accents as you read, please remember how Ozzie Guillen actually sounds, and consider that I did him a favor.

The strip will be back in our regular rotation again from here on out (because baseball season being over is the best time for Dugouts, because I’m not watching baseball and things are actually happening) so be sure to like us on Facebook to keep up with the stories and drop us a comment either here or there. We’d also appreciate feedback in the form of 62-foot boats.

Today’s Dugout follows.

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