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#OnDeck: NL East's biggest villain fielding a new contender

The Marlins aren't trading Giancarlo Stanton.

Many general managers heard it again and again, Ruben Amaro among them. The Phillies GM admittedin 2013 that he had tried to trade for the slugger "at least ten times." And why not? From 2011-13, Stanton slugged .542 while the rest of baseball mustered an average SLG of .400. He broke scoreboards, he set distance records, he hit the ball over scoreboards. It didn't take much more for other GMs to want to leave him a voicemail.

But after years of just simply saying Stanton, the best player on a bad team that made itself seem unwilling and/or unable to pay to keep players, was going nowhere, Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria made sure Stanton was staying put this past winter with an unholy 13-year, $325 million contract.

"Stay tuned," Loria told the press. "That's all I have to say. Just stay tuned.''

What else does Loria have up his sleeve, and how willing are people to put up with him?

The Fish have had a busy winter; busier than the Phillies, but not quite as busy as the Padres. They acquired via trade Martin Prado and David Phelps from the Yankees, they reeled in Michael Morse with a two-year deal, they traded with the Reds for Mat Latos, and Dee Gordon came over in a trade with the Dodgers. We've talked before about how Miami has a brand new infield, having taken appropriate action to deal with one of their glaring weaknesses.

While they're not elite players, they are improvements, and the move has become a good starting point and looks even better with other factors: Stanton's deal, fledgling ace Jose Fernandez is coming back after Tommy John surgery, their Stanton-Marcell Ozuna-Christian Yelich outfield doesn't have a bad player in it, and they now want their fourth outfielder to be Ichiro Suzuki, who, at 41, still hit .289/.324/.340 last year. Loria has improved a team that plays in a division that at the moment is a shoulder pop or a gust of wind away from being up for grabs.

For somebody just starting to pay attention to baseball, Loria looks like he sort of knows what he's doing. But it doesn't seem that long ago that he was baseball's most sinister villain. That's because it isn't.

It was only last May when Ken Rosenthal put Loria at the head of a "fractured organization." The month before, Business Week asked why Loria was "the most hated man in baseball." ESPN called him "the most dishonest owner in sports" the previous September. And this was after a considerable downtick in anti-Loria rhetoric. Never was Loria as hated publicly as he was the year prior, following Miami's 2012 season.

After acquiring what was essentially a whole new team that cost $191 million, and a whole new stadium that will wind up costing Miami-Dade County $1.2 billion by the time it's finished being paid for in 2048 (This covers a lot of the "most hated" stuff), Loria put together a trade that the Washington Post said showed both Loria and the league at their worst .

Loria watched his fresh 2012 Miami Marlins lose 92 games, finish in last place, and faced a winter of uncertainty - well, not really. He seemed pretty certain when he sent most of his players to the Blue Jays in a huge February 2013 trade that stunned everyone from the fans to the city of Miami to the players themselves. Until Loria included All-Star shortstop Jose Reyes in the deal, he had been trying to get Reyes to settle down and buy a house in the area.

The people of Miami were noticably upset, having just watched their county borrow part of a $500 million sum from Wall Street to help pay for Marlins Park, a facility for which the Marlins paid less than 20% of the total cost and was built on the ashes of The Orange Bowl. Loria had responded to critics of his massive, 12-player trade by claiming the Marlins cost too much, and he had to trim payroll to try and generate a winning team through some other method. But to everyone else it looked like he was selling off a team he had pitched as a solid investment to the area after only one season.

The whole thing left the baseball public somewhat flabbergasted, including a 22-year-old who at the time was on a $480,000 deal.

Ken Rosenthal figured Loria's next move was selling the team; The Miami Herald had steam coming out of its ears ; The New York Times claimed the Marlins had traded "away their dignity."

After losing an even 100 games in 2013, there was no denying that at this point, they were the league's punchline. The team managed to recoup and had a better year in 2014, with the first hints of change as homegrown players like Marcell Ozuna and Christian Yelich moved into full-time roles and the team pushed past the Phillies into fourth place.

At this point, Miami is in an interesting spot. Loria remains despised for the transgressions of his past, but now, instead of being the owner of a last place team showing off their ridiculous home run sculpture, the Marlins are young, making moves, and signing their star long term. Some people have more confidence than others that Loria's 2012 trade brought in talent that is only now starting to pay off , or that the players he acquired in said trade ( Yunel Escobar, Adeiny Hechavarria, Henderson Alvarez, Jeff Mathis, Justin Nicolino, Anthony Desclafani and Jake Marisnick ) had been projected at the time of the deal to find any of the success that they have. The part that makes their potential contention in 2015 more of a reality is that they play in the NL East, a division projected to be the worst in the sport that features not one, but two teams simultaneously blowing it all up and starting over.

Whether he intended it or not, Loria is sitting on a team that could win its division and fall into a playoff spot, having built up the Marlins in the hope that they'll be good enough for you to forget about all the other stuff he's done. No matter what happens, you know he's going to find a way for the Marlins to make him money.