Report: Jeff Loria has a handshake agreement to sell the Marlins - MLB

Mike Ozanian of Forbes reports that Jeff Loria has a “handshake agreement” to sell the Miami Marlins. The price: $1.6 billion. Loria paid $158 million for the baseball team in 2002.

The identity of the buyer is not reported, but Ozanian says it’s a real estate developer from New York. As you know, however, Major League Baseball, with its antitrust agreement in hand, must approve any buyer, and they prefer owners who will not rock the boat. That said, Loria has been through the franchise sale rodeo before, having once owned the Expos. Major League Baseball’s tolerance of his ownership of his two teams has made him fabulously wealthy, so it’s not as if he’s the type that would necessarily rock the boat when it came to finding an acceptable buyer.

Stay tuned.

Follow @craigcalcaterra

Roger Clemens will be an analyst for ESPN when the defending World Series champion Houston Astros host the Chicago White Sox on opening day.

Clemens made four appearances on last year’s KayRod Cast with Michael Kay and Alex Rodriguez. He will be stepping in on March 30 for David Cone, who will be doing the New York Yankees opener against the San Francisco Giants on YES Network.

“Roger has been sort of a friend of ours for the last year, so to speak, he’s in. He’s been engaged, knowledgeable and really present,” said ESPN Vice President of Production Phil Orlins. “You know, whatever past may be, he’s still tremendously engaged and he really brought that every time he was with us.”

Clemens was a seven-time Cy Young winner but his career after baseball has been tainted by allegations of performance-enhancing drug use. He is a Houston native and pitched for the Astros for three seasons.

Orlins said that with the rules changes and pitch clock, it is important to have a pitcher in the booth with Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez.

“We don’t feel like we have to have the dynamic of Eduardo with a pitcher, but we certainly think that works. Throw in the added factor of rule changes and it is better to have a batter-pitcher perspective,” Orlins said.

Orlins did not say if this would open the door for future opportunities for Clemens as an ESPN analyst.