Major League Ballfields and Art Deals with Jeffrey Loria

and it's been on for years. It's been on for years, and I was feeling good that night and I was walking by one of my favorite sculptures of all time. Did I ever tell you the story about why I love that sculpture so much? No? It is Myles Law Riviere, which was made in about nineteen thirty thirty one one. And when I was a college student at Barnard College, I would spend my Tuesday evenings at the Museum of

Modern Art and I would listen to music. They had a music music at night every Tuesday night in the summertimes, and I would rest my arm or my head on the leg of La Riviere, which was a beautiful sculpture in the pool in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art on fifty third Street. And I always said to myself, if I could ever buy a sculpture, I would buy La Riviere. And then I saw a casting of it at the Armory, and Jeffrey was the dealer, and we made a deal, and we made a friendship,

and we made a friendship. And thank you very much for that, because I have enjoyed her so much. She's one of the most beautiful, beautiful female sculptures I've ever seen. And you have one too, I hear in your garden. I have one at the end of a swimming pool. She exists to lie down next to a body of water. And although in law in the Twilries she's on a pedestal, well, they don't have any water there, that's right, No, no pond right there. And in my garden she's actually resting

in a beautiful mossy garden surrounded by low shrubs. But she's beautiful and you look down on her, which is which is a nice way to look at her. Well. Sculpture is meant to be seen in many places and many viewpoints, and so it can be in a garden. It can be here a pool, It can be up on a pedestal, high up on a pedestal, but you try to make eye to eye contact with it. But see, we're getting off track here talking about one specific sculpture when I really want to introduce you to Jeffrey Lauria.

I've known him through his two driving passions, baseball and art. He began as a highly successful dealer in the art world of the nineteen sixties, and as private collecting grew into the enormous business that it has become today. In nineteen eighty nine, Jeffrey began to pursue the penultimate dream for any true baseball fan to be the owner of a professional baseball team. So he eventually became the owner of the Montreal Expos and then later the Miami Marlins.

Jeffrey has just published a book filled with stories and insights from his two fascinating careers. It's titled From the Front Row Reflections of a Major League Baseball Owner and a Modern Art Dealer. Welcome Jeffrey. Each of my podcasts and I love your book. It is really informative and it is also a kind of a great, big fat book. Full of good advice for anybody in business, anybody thinking

about business. When you examine somebody's career, a career like yours, which has been so phenomenally successful, it's really nice to know the backstories. And this book is so full of stories. You have lived in an extremely full life. I feel very fortunate, Martha, to have been part of two worlds. The baseball world, which came in the late eighties when I broughte a minor league team to see if I like the industry, and then eventually the major league club

in late nineties. And having started in the early sixties in the art world, I guess I can say I came of age at the right time. I decided to put it all together, and when I sold the team in twenty seventeen, decided that I'd had some great experiences that I would like to share, and hence the book. Now. This book is available on Amazon, Amazon and bookstores soon. Yeah from the Front Row, published by Post Hill Press. Right L O. R I A. Is the last name

of Jeffrey Lauria. It is a very interesting book and it has some very interesting illustrations of fabulous pictures. You did a great job the book is divided in both the art world and the baseball world. But it seems they seems so foreign. It's not, but it's not, is it. No, As you say, the baseball player is so much like an artist. I Martha, I always felt equally comfortable in an artist studio as I did on a baseball field

or in a clubhouse. They sort of I mean, I could be watching a baseball game in Miami and learn about some work of art. I have to excuse myself for two minutes. But both worlds came together very well for me. You know that they both produce a lot of magic, a lot of drama, and a lot of excitement. And that's that's what life is about. You had that intuition of focusing on two giant businesses that are fun. Art is fun and baseball is really fun. I've been

a baseball fan forever. I don't I don't know if you know that I babysat for Gil McDougal's kids, Yogi Bearer's kids. We were all young, young high school girls in Nutley, New Jersey, and they lived in te Neck, right across the river from Yankee Stadium. And we would and we were so trustworthy of these, this gang of girls from Nutley that we were always invited to babysit for the baseball players. Gil McDougall was one of my heroes growing up. I didn't know that, and and I

knew exactly where he lived on. I think Leroy Street in Teaneck or Tenafly. You are right up there. Oh. And he was so charming, His wife was so nice, the kids were great and um and he. I have signed baseball card from Gil McDougall. I wonder what that's worth these days. Probably not as much as the Mickey Mantel card, which I do not have. I gave that one away. But but I love those I love those guys. They were really fun. And Yogi berra he actually remember.

He didn't remember that I baby said for his kids, but his wife did. I've spent lots of time. I'm in the Yankee box with Yogi Vera and his wife at Yankee Stadium. I grew I grew up in Yankee Stadium. You did, so, where did you grow up? Where were

you born? I was born in Manhattan, New York City, went to public school here in New York, played baseball at Steves In High School, and started going up to Yankee Stadium to chase my eventual dream when I was probably ten years old, when it was easy to get on a subway. So was it a dream to play baseball or well, it was both. It was first a dream to play the game and to play it well, and then to be around these players. What did you play?

I played second base. I didn't have my growth spurt until I got to Yale, and so I was an infielder and going up to Yankee Stadium looking for autographs at an early age when I was, as I said, ten or eleven, did you ever catch a fly ball? There's a funny story with that. Yeah. I never caught a ball, either fair, foul, or in batting practice. But one day when I was in Miami with the Marlins, Barry Bonds came over to me and we started chatting, and he told me that he had a son who

wanted to go to Yale. What did I think of the school? Of course, I could say nothing but great things. And then I said to him, you know, I never caught a foul ball, even in batting practice or any other time during the game. The first ending he came to bat and the first pitch he hit was straight up and was right over my head. Wow. And I could see it coming down and giving me a good shot on the head. So I put myself right under the eve of the of the dugout and it hit

the eve of the dugout. And Barry was standing at home play laughing at me. He yelled over you said, you never caught a foul ball, and you hit from this one. I said, Barry, there's no way you can control a bat. They hit it right here at that moment he was he was joking, of course he was joking. But did you get the ball? No, somebody else, somebody else jumped in and took the ball. I'm always amazed when people catch them, but they're time to get into

the stands. They're not that dangerous. But I sit in Jane Heller's seats, which are frightening because they now, yeah, right next to the dugout and right behind home plate, and it's really frightening because you're worry about getting hit by something very hard. Well, this week is Opening Day week for baseball. Are you going to Opening Day at Yankee Stadium? I am, I'm going to. I'll see you there, and I'd like to go. It's kind of tradition to go. And I'm posting a picture on my Instagram of me

and my baseball dress from many years ago. Nicole Miller made us baseball dresses. So they're white sleeveless dresses with the red stitching, so it looks like we're it's a stitch baseball hard ball. But what team are you watching closely this year? I don't have a particular team. I do enjoy going to the stadium and I like going out city field. I like the game, and the game is what's of interest to me, right, and individual star players, Yeah,

there are a number of players. I mean, there's a player on the Yankees, John Carlos Stanton, who played for me in Miami. I have a particular fondness for him. Oh so, how old is he now? Thirty one? Perhaps, well, he was even a younger baby when we signed him to that massive contract that he got. Right, it's pretty good to be in the in the front row and

watching those games and the excitement. Would you be able to spot talent in the art world or in baseball if you didn't have that view from the front row. I think it's it's something you accumulate over a period of time. Baseball players and artists are pretty similar. I mean they both put their talents on the line, and neither of them is really stifled by criticism, but they

focus on what they're doing. And the baseball players that I have watched along with my scouts, at the time I watched them, I had a pretty good idea who they were, but I didn't make final decisions. I made encouraging encouragement along the way. When did that start trading players? Yeah, way before. Babe Ruth. Remember when he was traded from the Boston Red Sox to the Yankees. That was a bad trade. That was a bad trade for Boston. Yes,

great trade for New York it was. But most of the time when we trade players, it's to improve the team. You have twenty five players on a club and you want to make sure that they're all contributing, and so you need to um watch every aspect of it. You know, you can have great pitching, and if you don't have good and good infield, the pitchers don't matter. You know, you need hitters, you need you need all aspects of the game, and you use the players to trade to

improve your club. Well, when you bought Montreal M what did you pay for that team at the time? Somewhere around one hundred and twenty five million dollars. But I didn't buy the whole team. I bought trolling interest in the team to operate the team and to again see if I like the ownership at the major league level, which I did. I like the whole camaraderie with the players and with the industry. The industry wonderful people, and I think that's due in part because they've had great

leadership during the time I was there. Oh, so your interest was only one hundred and twenty million, My interest was less than that because I bought a percentage of it. Of that price, Well, now, valuation was it? Yes, I guess one hundred and twenty or one hundred and forty million, I don't remember. Now, Well, how much is the Yankee team worth now? Probably in excess of four billion. So what was a TV? Is? TV? Is that? What did it? Well, it's all a function of revenues, and TV as a

main contributor to those revenues. Because the prices have gone up skyrocketed for any of the teams. Well, what's the highest price paid for a baseball team. Ever, I think at the moment the Dodgers probably hold that record at two point four billion dollars. And who do you think is going to win the series this year? What is what's the prognostication? Well, there are a lot of good clubs there. I think the Mets have a great opportunity. I think Houston does again. I think the Braves have

improved themselves and the Dodgers. The Dodgers always have a great club and they work hard at figuring out what they need to figure out. Now, did you ever toss the first pitch? I did it in spring training. Once, you know, owners, owners are not the most beloved people. The fans, for the most part, want more. They have their own think, they have their opinions, and they want more and they want it now. And that's that's what makes the game so interesting. Yeah, well it's it's I

think it's that's happening in all sports. I mean, I read, you know, I read the stories, the headlines in the sports page. It's just to keep keep up with my grandson. So I try to be at least a little bit educated. But there's always disputes, there's always sales, there's always trades, so you as a baseball player, you did not continue playing,

but you continued your I do have own ownership. At one day, well, I bought the Marlins when there was a very complicated three way trade when baseball wanted to move out of Montreal and hopefully moved down to Washington one day, so my son David, who was the president of our team, we orchestrated a three way trade whereby we moved from Montreal to Miami. The man who owned the Miami club at the time, the Marlins. The man who owned the Marlins, wanted to buy the club in Boston.

He insisted that it had to be Boston, although I pointed out he wanted out of Miami because they were not going to build a stadium for him. He made the egregious mistake of saying to the leaders there, if you don't build a stadium for me, I'll build it myself. You never say that, And so he needed to move somewhere else, and he decided that he didn't want to go to California to buy the Angels, which were for sale. And the year that he did and go there, they

won the World Series. But the next the next year he had the opportunity to go to Boston and we made this three three way trade and I assumed control of the Marlins and took us a few years to get a stadium built, which was a main focus, utiful stadium. I remember going there to see your new stadium. It was just the most spectacular place. Well it's a It was a passion of mind because of my art history background, to build something architecturally that would be spectacular. And who

was the architect um Populous. They were the architects for most bullparks. And I remember the day we got permission to go ahead with the stadium. I was in London and called the called the architect and said, would you be able to talk now we have permission? Where are you? He said, I'm in London. He came to the hotel Claridge's Hotel, where I was staying at the time, and I made a little sketch on a napkin. He took the sketch, made a better drawing and that became the stadium.

He asked me at the time if I wanted to build a retro facility because there was a lot of Art deco in Miami, and I said no, I think we need to look forward, and we built a very contemporary stadium. It's really beautiful building. Yeah, it's beautiful. And then I remember the new owners took out some of the art that you would as well. That's a that's a sad story, but they they We had commissioned the pop artist Red Grooms to do a big sculpture at

which woods, an interactive sculpture. It jumped into action when people when players hit home runs and the home team won the game, fish jumped into the water, water splashed, birds flew, lights were lit up all and the new owners just wanted to do their own things, so they basically took it down and put it out in the weather. So who knows how long it will last. It was. It was a cause for some consternation on my part because I didn't think they had the right to destroy

public art. Yeah, that's true. Bad they did because it was spectacular. So you bought the Marlins and then you had big surprises along the way. You found amazing players. Well, in two thousand and two was a year that I spent studying the club and looking at what we needed, and by the time two thousand and three came around, we had some pretty good pitchers on our club at

the time. I thought we needed an established, well established catcher, and I had my eyes focused on Pudge Fredriguez, who was not signed by anybody at the time, and we got in touch with his agent eventually signed him because he was the one that could handle pitchers. Runners weren't going to steal basis and Pudge was a leader and he did a great job. In the end, my general manager was not happy because he thought he's washed up.

It's just why the Rangers didn't sign him. But I took that chance and he played I don't know six eight more years after US and it was the only World Championship he ever won. When he won the World Series, three Yankees and three Yes, Yankee Stadium and Yankee Statum. How did you feel, I had mismixed emotions. You know, I grew up a Yankee fan. I used to go

up there all the time. I remember when I was there with eight years old with my father, sitting in the stands behind a pole in the old Yankee Stadium, thinking that I had the best seat in the Yankee Stadium. And at the end of that game, the Yankees lost and I went home the I think so it was close. Yeah, it was close, and the Yankees had an opportunity to win it. I don't remember if I was there that year or not. I probably was forty I think it

was nineteen forty eight or nine. I went there with my father, boy, and I walked out of the stadium in tears, and my father said, Jeffrey, there'll be another game. Guess what he was right? Was he alive when you bought about the team, the Marlins. No, so he didn't get to see that game. No, and he didn't get to see me win a championship in the minor leagues either. Wow. It was just towards the end of his life. You've learned so many lessons, and you have imparted many of

those lessons in your fabulous book. What made you write this book now? From the front row? Well, I guess I felt that I had an opportunity to impart a lot of relationships that I had, some stories that I have memories that are very interesting to read. I mean, I was at the forefront of a lot in the

art world and in the baseball worlds. Let's get into the art a little bit, because your ability to spot art you had an innate ability to know what was good, what appealed to you, and to meet artists and to develop relationships with artists. Not very many people do that. Well, You've done it amazingly well. So tell us a little bit about the beginning. I studied art history at Yale, and my parents had sent me up there to become

a premed student. And after six months of zoology, biology, botany, and chemistry, I called him and said, there's no more premed on the horizon. That I wanted to do something else. And I was taking in art history course you had to take. One of the areas of concentration had to be a history course, and our history seemed interesting. What period you remember the art history? It was the beginning art history course I was taking, and it was the

course taught by the eminent art historian Vincent Scully. Oh. He's fantastic, written many books, many books, and a great favorite of mine. And we had a wonderful relationship, and he encouraged me, and he kept encouraging me all the way till the at the end of his life, when I then had the opportunity to return the favor and bring him to spring training and bring him to opening day because he was living in Miami at that time.

Great and we had a lot of fun. I studied the art history all through college, and by the time I was ready, it was your favorite period modern art. Did you learn Greek and Roman? And yeah, we had to take those courses. Those courses, I mean, you don't get to the modern without understanding what some of the Greek and Romans were doing, because everything builds on itself. And came time for graduation, my parents came up to school and showed me an article in a newspaper that Sears,

Roebuck and Company was going into the art business. They were opening stores all over the country. What year was that, nineteen sixty two when I graduated. It's major growth of the company all over the country, and they were looking to bring in a new clientele, and so the art was the vehicle for them to do that, so that they were not just known in all these new cities where they were building as a place where you can buy furniture and a refrigerator. Well they were they to me,

Sears Robook. I always loved that company, and I thought they just missed the boat by They were the first. They were the first that catalog was I poured over that Sears catalog, that big fat catalog that, oh I know. And they were really the first Amazon. And they could have been the Amazon if they had believed in the Internet. But by the time, by the time the Internet became a powerhouse. Arthur Martinez was the CEO of Sears and

he didn't quite get He didn't get quite get. You know, no stores you buy from the pages of your catalog, which is online. They didn't get it. And uh and Jeff Bezos got it really big. And do you remember all those all that happening. I mean, it was just I remember, I remember the catalogs. Oh yeah, I even did the first art catalog. So and so what did you sell in it? Well, we sold lithographs and etchings. I remember commissioning Salvador Dolli to do a painting and

three hundred lithographs. But did you pay him? I'm ashamed to say we paid him twenty five thousand dollars for a painting, which I felt was worth the twenty five thou and the three hundred lithographs that we sold for four hundred dollars a piece. Quickly and Sears hired Vincent Price, the actor or to be the person whose collection this was in the store, and my dad suggested I get in touch with Price, which I did. We eventually met

and I became the youngest buyer in Sear's history. And it was a great experience because I got to meet all the artists. It was a time when you could call them and see them. End of my junior year, my parents wanted to know what I was doing for spring vacation. Was I going to fall at Lauderdale? And I said, no, I'm going to go to England if you'll buy me an airline ticket. I want to meet

Henry Moore. And I had discovered in my way Henry Moore at college, so I went to visit with him, and at the time, I guess I was the youngest person ever to walk in his studio. And we hit it off and we became very close. Oh, I love his sculpture. And did you ever go it was foundry in Italy. I was everywhere he worked, even the quarries in Pietra Santa where he worked during the summer and

doing his carvings. You're incredible and then you became dealers for these artists well, I had my own personal relationships with them and eventually opened my own business and started building collections slowly, and I dealt with, you know, collectors. The Chrysler family had a collection, and Walter christ was building a museum in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was his wife's family was from. And Norton Simon, the industrialists who

lived in California. I spent a lot of time seeing him, and I talk about him in the book in very interesting people, these these giants. Did you have to educate them or were they already educated? These great wealth collectors? Both ways it went. I mean, Norton Simon called me one night and said, I hear you were a young

deal and you know something about sculpture and pain. I was probably twenty eight at the time, and we spoke that night for five hours on the phone, and we became close, and I helped him buy lots of things that he as in his museum, including a big Henry Moore sculpture which I bought in England and brought over to the United States on a ship. Traveled his luggage and I tried to encourage him to come and see it. How many tons was that one? Three? Yeah? They were

very big, those Henry Moors. You have so many stories in the book. What's something that you wish you had never sold? One of them is with Norton Simon. I mean, I had this great Henry Moore sculpture which I brought over and I thought he might be the perfect line for it. And Norton didn't respond. You know, three months for months went by, and he called me one day on a Friday afternoon, and you had laid out the money already. Oh, I had bought it. I didn't. I

never bought for anybody specifically. I bought for myself and realizing that eventually it could be placed. He called me on a Friday afternoon, said, I'm in New York. I want to see the sculpture. I said, it's in a warehouse. They're closed on Saturdays. Find a way. I found a way, and he bought the sculpture. Wow, and saw it and loved it. Yeah. Any paintings that you regret the wood

A could have should us well. I had a number of very important Surrealist paintings in the mid seventies that that was the time when the Japanese were really pursuing art and buying art and I had Miro's one of them his greatest paintings of a dancer listening to music and a Gothic cathedral, a huge upright painting. And I had a Tongee Eve Tangee painting that had been purchased

by the collector. I bought it from Pittsburgh, which was sent by the artist to the Carnegie Exhibition in nineteen thirty eight, and artists sent their masterpieces to show off their work. And I eventually bought those pictures and I had them. I was tempted not to sell them, but the temptation from the from the buyers encouraged me to sell them. And you'd love to have them back there. That's what being a dealer is. Well, you can't keep everything you know, no matter what business you're in. And

what have you kept for yourself? What's what's in your collection? Pablo Picasso verst Picasso, I ever bought you kept? I kept? Yeah? And I have a lot of Henry Moore sculptures. At one time I had sixty or seventy sculptures of Henry's. Wow, and a colleague of mine came to my home and he said to me, what are you doing with all these sculptures, sell half of them and buy some other artists. And I thought about it, and I said, that makes more sense than what I'm doing. I loved Henry's work

and I love collecting them. Well. Gordon Buncheft was a big Henry Moore fan, yes, and I bought I bought Gordon Buncheff's little house in East Hampton. Oh, that beautiful house on Georgia a pond. And when I bought it, the Museum of Modern Art owned it, and Gordon had left it to the museum, and in the garden was a beautiful Henry Moore. There were, oh gosh, there were about five really important sculptures in the garden, but the

museum was taking them all. And moon Bird was in the garden, and they left all the frames, all those very heavy cast iron frames and steel frames and platforms. They left all of that in the garden for me. Nothing on them, just the platforms, the plints. So I got to know what Gordon had liked, because he was placing those same kinds of sculptures and the buildings he was building in New York City. He did one Chase Manhattan Plaza, he did the Lever house and oh yeah,

lots of dubuffet. It was a really interesting experience from me to buy a house like that. And I always thought, gosh, he must not like his wife very much because the kitchen on Georgia Capond had a wall, had no windows. He had his wife cooking in a kitchen with no windows facing the view. And the house was just a basic like a shoe box of travertine left over from probably the Chase Manhattan Plaza, because that was a travertine clad building and he built it out of concrete and

travertine and cinder blox. It was beautiful. My daughter sold that, but it was it was a special place. But I loved the sculptures in the garden, and I've always loved sculptures ever ever since I went to that Museum of Modern Art garden and loved the beautiful sculptures in that garden. But do you have any Sarah's Sarah? No, I don't have any Sarah. Yeah. I have Marino Marini and Jacomo Monzoo and Saysar and Botero and Robert Indiana. I had

dinner with Botero one night. He was interesting, he was I have a lot of art history background which because my husband was the publisher of Abram's Art Books books, all those early books, and Andy was the president of Abrams and he worked with Harry and uh and he published all those big books. And remember the Lawrence Gowing book on the on the Louver. There's there's great big books that Abrams used to do. So I learned a lot about art. Unfortunately I didn't buy art like you

were buying art. I wish I had because I could have. Really I loved so much of it and it was so and I'm jealous of people like you who have developed their taste into a business. You have a lot of ideas for people who in and in your book you impart those I call him the tenants of business. So talk about those, because you have a whole list of things that you advise people in business to do well. I think I think the most one of the most important things that I've always believed in was you have

to take risks. Um For me, it was a risk and a chance that I took when at age nineteen, got on an airplane went to England knowing nobody to visit an artist. And I think if you're not willing to take risks, there's no rewards. Did you read Edith Wharton's New York Stories? Did you read that one story? Oh, there's a story I'm going to send to you about a young man who is the ski on of a big New York, very wealthy New York family, and he's given by his father ten thousand dollars to go to

Europe to buy his art collection. And at the time, ten thousand dollars was like like early early twentieth century, I think ten thousand dollars was a lot of money. And he went to England and he then went to Italy and he came back with a collection that was probably what you would have bought and if you were in his position. He brought a man ten Ya. You know, nobody had ever heard of him. He bought some caravaggios, nobody masters, nobody had heard of any of these guys.

When he came back, his father looked at the collection and just owned him. He said, you wasted my money on that stuff, And he just owned the boy. And the boy opened a little thinking museum in the village of New York, in the West Village, and people would come and pay a few cents to see the art, and then of course all everything he had bought turned out to be a priceless masterpiece. So he had the taste. He didn't have the belief of his father or and

his friends didn't believe what he was up to. But it's a fabulous story. You have to read it. It's really right. But but you had that, you had that. I well, I think I developed that high early age. Took you took risks, yes, okay, And I never believed calculated risks. Yes, yeah, because I always tell people to take a risk, but don't take a chance, and it's part of taking risks. You have to know that a

fear of failure is never an option. No fear. The one thing that can be a real detriment in any business transaction, whether you're buying a player, baseball player or a great work of artist, hesitation. If you hesitate, you're going to be lost. They did that a few times. But I learned quickly that a hesitation is a destriment that I don't want to live with. And so I've always believed that you have to do it right or don't do it at all. That was something that I

learned from my father. Don't get started on something you can't complete, and if you're going to complete it in a half baked way, don't do it right. And while you're doing it, I learned along the way that quality was always more important than quantity. I always pursued a single great player rather than four players that build various spots, because that one player I always felt could add more to the team than the two or three that we needed. But we'd find them elsewhere. You got to you have

to pursue the quality. They also have lived by the credo that you have to surround yourself with good people. I had great executives, and I in my baseball career. Towards the last few years after we opened the stadium, I decided to pursue some really top executives, and it took me a few years to put them all together, and we had a really good operating team until the new ownership came in and fired them all in the

first week. I heard that, well, they didn't even give them a chance, and they had to pay their salaries for the lengths of those contracts. That I never quite understood why you would do that. One of the things that I have found along the way after I'm doing

this for close to six decades now. Is you have to expect the unexpected things come your way that you had no idea we're going to come your way, but you have to be prepared for it and opportunity as well as both sides of the coin failure, good things and bad things, but you have to expect that those kinds of things are going to happen. I always bought and traded, whether I was trading pictures, which you could do at one time, trade work of art, which I did.

I always felt that I wanted to be doing the deal that I wanted to do, not what others wanted me to do. In other words, if somebody had something and they felt that was great, if I wanted to do it too, then it worked. But if that was not going to be the case, you're going to end up making a poor decision that you're going to regret. You have to have a bit of a thick skin to work in both those worlds. It's not that I

have it. I developed it along the way and realized that that's the only way to get to the bottom line and to the end successfully. You need a lot of humility too, and that doesn't always come easily to a lot of people. I don't know if it came easily or not to me, but it seems to have worked for me. Those are valuable lessons and valuable, valuable rules for running a business, and just well, there's there's one more which I find find very curious, which is

you have to use your eyes. You have to trust your eye and use your eyes. I was at an exhibition in London recently with my wife and she she had me. She had encouraged me to listen to David Hockney and one of the things he said just really struck up a note, and I remember it now that most people don't know how to use their eyes. The only thing they used their eyes for, said David, was to see the street in the road in front of them. But they're not looking up and around them, and that's important.

I'm always looking up. So you and I agree on this list a lot. I like your lists. And you know what else, Sometimes the best deals the deals you don't do, like not buying a particular painting and realizing later that that picture really wasn't as good as it could have been, that there are better works. I always strive for the best, and not having enough information about that artist meant that I was not striving for the best,

not ready for it. Yeah, not ready for it. And that was a good deal not to have done what I didn't do. Things happened to you too in life. I mean, I love that you say go for it, and really, if you believe in it, act act quickly. And in parts of my life, I just I lost that ability to act quickly. It's just I just hesitated. And hesitation, as as you said, it's just a killer, a killer. Hesitating is really bad. So what's next? What else are you going to do? You have so much

energy and so many good ideas. And do you have a shop where you sell your art? No, I'm a private dealer. I'm in the phone book, right, but I do it privately. And do you have one piece of art that you would never give up? Yeah? How many years ago I bought a study for the famous painting of Mattis called The Dance. And I didn't realize it, but I was thumbing through the Alfred Barr book. The

Alfred Alfred Barr was the director of MoMA. Oh yes, and he wrote a book about Matisse, and I was reading through the book, and on one page in a postage size reproduction, there's a little work that I bought. It's so elegant and so much movement, and it's and it's the embodiment of Matis. So I think I would never part with that nice and that you can continually

discover things about it right all the time. Yeah, oh great. Well, you can enjoy more of Jeffrey's stories in his new book From the front Row, Reflections of a Major League Baseball Owner and Modern Art Dealer. Be sure to pick it up wherever you like to get your books, And Jeffrey that we could talk forever. I think your stories are fascinating and your life has been an amazing, amazing journey and which continues every single day. Take care of

your family. They're lovely. I got to meet some of them at the talk you did the other night at at Christie's. Yeah, it was a beautiful night. That was a really a pleasure and a great celebration for this book and keep going. Thanks, thanks very much.