I called Jeffrey Loria at noon last Thursday. No one answered the telephone in his Miami Marlins office so I called his New York number. When he isn’t in Florida on baseball business, Loria is in New York. He is an international art dealer and apparently made enough money to buy baseball teams, minor league and major.

His major league team has been one of the topics of discussion involving Loria so I figured I would call him and see what was happening with the reported sale of his team and reports about his becoming the United States ambassador to France.

I didn’t really expect Loria to talk to me. He hasn’t for years. That wasn’t the case when I worked for The New York Times. As a New York resident and an art dealer, Loria felt the Times was important to him and his business.

He used to tell me I was the best baseball writer in the business and how important I was to baseball coverage. That all changed when I left the Times in 2008. I don’t think he has returned a call since.

In this instance, though, I felt it was worth making the effort.

To my surprise, Loria answered the New York phone. I could only guess he didn’t have caller I.D.

“Jeffrey,” I exclaimed in my voice of surprise.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Murray Chass,” I said.

“No comments,” Loria said gruffly, using the plural.

“How do you know you don’t have any comments?” I asked. “I haven’t asked you anything.”

“I don’t want to talk,” he retorted even more gruffly. And then he quickly added, “I’m on the phone.” And he hung up. So much for my conversation.

To try to learn about Loria’s current activities, I turned to people who know him or have known him for years. Some of what I learned was told to me on the condition I not identify the speaker.

I realize President Donald Trump would not approve, but I thought I might be exempt because when I met Trump at Yankee Stadium years ago he told me he had been reading me since he was in college. (I was as skeptical of that claim as I was when Loria told me how good I was.)

As it turned out, Trump has a connection to Loria, though not directly but through Charles Kushner, father of Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to the president and his son-in-law.

Charles Kushner has been mentioned in just about all of the news reports of Loria’s attempt to sell the Marlins, but there has never been any validity to reports of Kushner’s involvement. Major League Baseball would never approve Kushner as an owner because he is a convicted felon, having served 14 months in prison for witness tampering and filing false tax returns and campaign finance reports.

In addition, M.L.B. issued a statement earlier this month saying:

“Under Major League Baseball rules, the Commissioner’s Office must be informed of any conversations about a potential sale. The Commissioner’s Office has not heard directly or indirectly of any conversation involving Charles Kushner.”

It was members of the Kushner family who were interested in pursuing the Marlins, but at some point somebody realized Loria couldn’t make a deal with them.

“This is what I’ve heard,” said a businessman close enough to the matter to hear what’s going on. “One of the Kushners, probably Charley, called Jeffrey last fall and asked him to contribute to the Trump campaign, possibly at the behest of his son, Jared. Jeffry contributed, I heard, $125,000 or $150,000.

“Shortly thereafter Jeffrey put the Marlins up for sale. My guess is an ambassadorship is worth more than what Jeffrey contributed and Jeffrey probably offered a deal for the Marlins. It was a handshake agreement.

“But somebody connected the dots and decided maybe there was a conflict of interest here. Jeffrey, not wanting to jeopardize his chances for the ambassadorship, which I think he really wants, then backed away. If Jeffrey doesn’t get it, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Kushners re-emerged.”

How did Loria originally connect with Kushner? That happened nearly 30 years ago, courtesy of Marvin Goldklang, a Livingston, N.J., resident and a limited partner in the Yankees’ ownership and owner of three minor league teams.

“In the summer of 1989,” Goldklang told me on the telephone last Friday, “I got a call from Bobby Murcer, who knew the owners of the Oklahoma City 89ers. We entered into an agreement to buy the team. There was a fellow I knew from Livingston, where I still live, named Charley Kushner. This was before Charley’s legal issues. He had an interest in becoming involved in sports. Charley agreed to become part of the purchasing group.

“Independently of that, I got a call from a lawyer in New York. He tells me he has a client who previously tried to purchase the Orioles and the Rangers. As the lawyer related to me, his client wasn’t taken seriously and he wanted to get involved actively in baseball in ownership, starting in the minors.”

The lawyer’s client was Loria.

“He had heard I was putting together a deal to buy the 89ers and asked if he could introduce me to Jeffrey, which he did,” Goldklang continued. “At that point I was introduced to Jeffrey. Jeffrey expressed an interest in purchasing equity control. At that point I was involved in purchasing a double A team in the Eastern League and running a single A team in the Florida State League and a single A team in the South Atlantic League.

“All of this was coming to a head in the summer of ’89, about September ‘89. I was amenable to not having equity control of Oklahoma City because I was concerned about having too much on my plate.

“We put together a deal in which Jeffrey, Charley Kushner, Bobby Murcer and myself purchased the ‘89ers. I guess I was the one who introduced Jeffrey to the Kushners back in September of 1989.”

As it turned out, the partnership was not forever.

“Two or three years into the partnership,” Goldklang related, “we had philosophical differences about how the team should be run. I went to Jeffrey and said I didn’t think the partnership was working. I proposed that I would buy him out or if he wanted he could buy me out. It’s time to end our partnership, I said. Jeffrey bought me out and continued in partnership with Kushner.”

Twenty-five years later, that baseball relationship is Loria’s path to France as U.S. ambassador. Marlins fans won’t be sorry to see him go. These comments were among the derogatory remarks that were tweeted recently:

• “The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French. To show our appreciation, The U.S. made Jeffrey Loria the Ambassador to France.”

• “Being reported that Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria up for US Ambassador to France…. As if the French didn’t hate us enough already”

• “How much do you have to hate a country to send them Jeffrey Loria to deal with?”

When Loria was still in Montreal as owner of the Expos, he complained to me about anti-Semitic attacks against him. I saw some of the newspaper cartoons he referred to, but now I wonder if he and not his Jewish religion prompted the fans’ feelings, that no matter what his religion or ethnicity was they would have reacted the same ugly way.

Loria escaped from Montreal with the help of Bud Selig, then the commissioner. It was in 2002, and Selig orchestrated a swap. The Expos would become stepchildren of Major League Baseball and Loria would buy the Marlins from John Henry, who would then be free to buy the Boston Red Sox from the Yawkey estate in one of those corrupt deals for which Selig was notorious.

Loria received $120 million for the Expos and an interest-free loan of $38.5 million from M.L.B. to help pay for the Marlins. Those two figures add to $158.5, which is what Loria paid for his new team.

Unlike most teams, the Marlins have not benefited from their new park, which opened in 2012. The Marlins twice decimated their roster after winning the World Series, either in the first off-season after or a year after. Those moves by two different owners, the second Loria, have turned the fans against the team.

Fans have also been turned off by the Marlins’ refusal to pay their players or to pay to attract players. In the last four years, to cite the most recent example, the Marlins have fielded the lowest paid team in the majors twice and the 28^th and 29^th teams in the 30-team salary rankings.

The Marlins’ payroll remains low in spite of the hefty payments they receive from revenue sharing, in the neighborhood of $50 million a year. After the commissioner’s office sends out the checks, Loria’s pockets become stuffed with cash.

IT’S MANFRED’S BAT BUT PLAYERS’ DECISION

Is Commissioner Rob Manfred going to take his bat and ball and go home?

That’s what it sounded like last week when Manfred complained that the union wasn’t responding how he thought it should to his ideas to enhance the pace of games.

“We have a disagreement about the need to push forward on these issues,” Manfred told reporters, adding, “I have to admit I was disappointed we could not even get the MLBPA to agree to even a modest rule changes like (limiting) trips to the mound.”

In a way I can understand Manfred’s frustration. It’s his ball and the players are playing with it without agreeing to the changes he wants to make.

But has he considered the possibility that the players have their own ideas, namely that they like the game the way it is and aren’t about to succumb to his wishes?

The players know the labor rules. They can block changes for a year, then the commissioner can impose his changes beginning in the second season. If the players want to retain the existing rules for one more season, they won’t discuss Manfred’s proposals.

If Manfred wants to make changes for 2018, he will be free to do that.

The players have been playing baseball all their lives. Manfred has been playing commissioner for only two years.