Jeffrey Loria Trades Away Marlins" Dignity We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria because it is no small feat these days to emerge as the most deplorable person in sports. The competition is extraordinarily tough. Just to win Tuesday's battle of reprobates, Loria had to nose out the former football star Jerramy Stevens, his rapsheet long enough to reach Jupiter, who was arrested on charges of assaulting his fiancée, the soccer player Hope Solo, a day before their planned wedding day. And both needed to edge ahead of the N.H.L., which is insulting each and every one of its fans with its "Save Us From Ourselves!" player lockout stretching into Month 2. Lm Otero/Associated Press Jose Reyes, left, and Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria, right, at a news conference in Dallas last December. Loria came out on top with a deal so egregiously bad, Florida might want to consider barring him from the state. Perhaps it can pass that law now that it is done figuring out Election Day. This came in the form of Tuesday's proposed trade that would send almost everyone of consequence left on the Marlins" roster (Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle, John Buck and Emilio Bonifacio) to the Blue Jays for some prospects and a case of Labatt Blue. This after having jettisoned Hanley Ramirez, Anibal Sanchez and Heath Bell. This kind of roster decimation is all part of the Marlins" traditional playbook, as Tyler Kepner writes in The Times, but becomes more despicable because Loria held up South Florida for 70 percent of the money for the new Marlins Stadium by promising it a real baseball franchise. This only confirms what Mario Puzo taught us in "The Godfather": "The man with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun." The proper outrage has swept through Miami, with David J. Neal writing in The Miami Herald that the entire area has been played for suckers. Dave Hyde fumes in The Sun-Sentinel that Loria just stamped out what was left of baseball in South Florida. One of the few Marlins left behind, Giancarlo Stanton, took to Twitter to vent his anger, and even those in Blue Jays country are not pretending the deal is defensible. The Toronto Globe and Mail's headline reads: "Blue Jays Plunder Marlins in Blockbuster Trade." As Tim Brown writes on Yahoo.com, Loria just traded away the last of the Marlins" dignity, and Ken Rosenthal writes on Foxsports.com that the move is only acceptable if the next one is Loria selling the team. Scott Miller of CBSSports.com implores baseball to step in and douse this little inferno, but baseball isn't much better at dousing infernos than Florida is at counting votes. The baseball fans of South Florida should have the final say and administer sobriety tests to anyone who buys a Marlins ticket next year. The whole sordid Hope Solo tale is being followed closely on Twitter by KING TV's Chris Daniels. Whatever actually happened in the dust-up that led to Stevens's arrest, his personal history dating to his days at the University of Washington, which included a controversial prosecutor's decision not to pursue a rape case against him, makes it extraordinarily hard to give him the benefit of the doubt on much of anything. His N.F.L. career highlights were a raft of driving-while-intoxicated and drug charges. After all that, it feels like a bit of a relief to fixate on matters of purely sports consequence, like the anxiety over Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger being out indefinitely with a shoulder injury. Other of the weekend's N.F.L. injuries were more troublesome, including three concussed quarterbacks. While Don Banks argues on SI.com that while the league is not yet dealing with in-game concussions perfectly, the three over the weekend represent a sort of progress. Still, as Jim Litke of The Associated Press writes, Commissioner Roger Goodell is still probably not the best keynote speaker on concussions. Perhaps the only worse keynote speaker on the topic is N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman, but he is busy running the worst of the recent sports lockouts. It gets that distinction, as Jeff MacGregor writes on ESPN.com, because the N.H.L. could least affort to alienate any fans it had left. Kentucky Coach John Calipari did not run much risk of alienating anyone with his ridiculous comments calling out Duke players for flopping on national television and then saying it was a joke. Sure, Pat Forde of Yahoo.com castigates him for it, but Calipari is already disliked by almost everyone not a Kentucky fan and even though his team lost to Duke in Tuesday night's game, it will still be a national championship contender again, Jeff Goodman writes on CBSSports.com. Perhaps Calipari should consider befriending Loria. He'd start looking awfully good by comparison.