Art Dealer Jeffrey Loria Says Derek Jeter ‘Destroyed’ Miami Marlins Ballpark After Moving $2.5 M. Red Grooms Sculpture

New York art dealer and former Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is immensely disappointed with what happened to the Red Grooms sculpture under Derek Jeter’s time as CEO of the Major League Baseball team.

“Jeter came in and destroyed the ballpark,” Loria told the Miami Herald, in his first public comments since selling the team. “Destroying public art was a horrible thing to do.”

Grooms, a friend of Loria, designed the colorful, site-specific sculpture through a $2.5 million contract with Miami-Dade County in 2012. Whenever the Marlins hit a home run or won a game, the 73-foot-tall sculpture named Homer would come alive for 29 seconds, with water-spouting fountains, dancing pelicans, flying fish, flashing lights, flapping flamingos, soaring seagulls, and spinning marlins leaping into action.

It was a polarizing, impossible-to-miss part of the ballpark, and it was relocated to an outside plaza based on a decision by Jeter.

“I asked the artist about getting it back, and I told him I would help him find a new home for it,” Loria told the Miami Herald. “He didn’t want to get involved. Now it will rot outside where it is… condemned to neglect and outdoor decay.”

The relocation happened after the Associated Press asked Michael Spring, director of the county’s department of cultural affairs, if there were plans to move the sculpture to another city. “We’re not interested in trading public art,” Spring said in 2018.

Grooms had also expressed a desire for Homer to stay behind the stadium’s center field wall. “What I would like is for it to stay there,” he told the Miami Herald in 2018. “I wish it would just stay there and be hit in the bean with baseballs.”

Loria recently published his autobiography From the Front Row: Reflections of a Major League Baseball Owner and Modern Art Dealer this past spring. The 82-year-old New Yorker was tight-lipped to ARTnews on his art dealings.