Ultimate Baseball Road Trip (45 page)

What lessons should big league teams draw from this? First off, some cities, like Miami, Denver, and Atlanta, are filled with transplants. Growing a fan base that will outlast the novelty takes time. Second, we think it’s that winning really isn’t everything when it comes to drawing crowds. Fan comfort and stadium amenities are pretty darned important too. And Marlins Ballpark provides both. More than just sporting a roof and blowing cool air, it offers seats that are all perfectly angled toward the infield. And that certainly couldn’t be said of the Marlins’ previous home. When larger crowds turned out at the stadium for the World Series games in 1997, many fans found that the only view of the game they enjoyed was on the JumboTron, because their seats, which had been conceived for football, didn’t even face the field.

Known at varying times during the Marlins’ stay as “Joe Robbie Stadium,” “Pro Player Park,” “Pro Player Stadium,” “Dolphins Stadium,” “Land Shark Stadium,” and “Sun Life Stadium,” the orange-seated behemoth could accommodate seventy-five thousand football fans and up to sixty-eight thousand spectators for baseball. Of course, the Marlins didn’t need all of those seats, so after debuting in 1993 at a stadium reconfigured to offer forty-eight thousand seats, they gradually opened fewer and fewer sections of the park to their patrons so that by the time they closed up shop there in 2011 the official baseball capacity had fallen to about thirty-eight thousand. As such, there were always more empty orange seats than people in the stadium when the Marlins played. A fit setting for baseball, it was not. Now, the Marlins welcome intimate gatherings of thirty-seven thousand people to their home. And there’s never going to be the outline of a football grid on its outfield lawn. And the diamond will never be worn out between the “hash marks.”

The Marlins and city and county officials talked about building a new park seemingly forever. The first serious rumblings began in the late 1990s when then-Marlins owner John W. Henry began lobbying for a new baseball-only facility. On multiple occasions a deal seemed imminent or even to have been struck, but the local politicians, who just couldn’t agree on how to fund the massive undertaking, consistently dashed the Marlins’ hopes. Finally, Henry gave up and sold the Marlins so that he could buy the Red Sox. All ended pretty well as far as he was concerned. His Red Sox became the first team to win two World Series in the new century. But the Marlins continued to hemorrhage fans as a cat-and-mouse game played out between the new Marlins ownership group, headed by Jeffrey Loria, and the Miami, Miami-Dade County and State of Florida politicians. At one point, it even appeared as though the Marlins might move to San Antonio, Texas.

Finally, a funding agreement was struck in 2007 that called for the construction of a $515 million baseball park in Miami. The measure called for the Marlins to foot $155 million of the tab, for Miami to chip in $13 million toward the stadium and to also make infrastructure improvements, and for Miami-Dade County to provide $347 million. Although most of the county’s fare would come from the sale of bonds backed by a tourist tax, this didn’t sit well with many local taxpayers who said they should have had the chance to thwart the ballpark financing plan via a voter referendum. A lawsuit to halt the ballpark plan ensued and though a circuit judge eventually ruled in favor of the ballpark proposal moving forward, the suit slowed down the effort to build the park. Finally, in March of 2009, Miami and Miami-Dade County re-approved the deal for about the twelfth time and work at the site began soon after. The first step was to demolish the Orange Bowl, which cost $10 million and was paid for by the City of Miami. Then construction began, following the blueprints drawn up by the noted ballpark architects at Populous.

We understand that the whole corporate welfare thing has gone on way too long as pertains to the construction of US sports stadiums. But at least the Marlins, who paid $120 million of their share up front, make an annual $2.3 million payment to Miami as part of their thirty-five-year lease with the city. And at least they changed their name from “Florida Marlins” to “Miami Marlins” in 2012 as part of the agreement. Comparatively, deals like this have been done in other cities where the home team has paid far less or practically nothing at all. Still, we understand where the local taxpayers were coming from in their resistance.

Josh:
I’d rather hand out tax-payer dough to ball teams than Big Oil.

Kevin:
Either way, public investments shouldn’t lead to private profits.

After a long, arduous, and yes, controversial, struggle, the Marlins finally opened their new park just as this edition of
The Ultimate Baseball Road Trip
was landing on bookstore shelves in the spring of 2012. Thanks to our friend Marty, though, who let us borrow his plutonium-propelled DeLorean, we were able to get a sneak peek of the yard before its grand debut. Okay, we also got some help from
a friend—who’s coincidentally also named Marty—in the Marlins media relations office, who provided us with some great information.

The Marlins scheduled two exhibition games against the Yankees at the end of the 2012 Grapefruit League season to make sure they had all the wrinkles ironed out of their game-day presentation. Then they opened their new tank officially with a regular season series against their longtime Spring Training roomies, the Cardinals, who share a facility in Jupiter, Florida, with them during March. The new era of Marlins baseball had begun.

Kevin:
We’ve seen the future …

Josh:
… and the future is teal.

Despite the fact that their old yard was subpar, their perennially flagging attendance, and their periodic firesales, the Marlins’ first era really wasn’t that bad. The team did claim two world championships in its first eleven seasons. And the Marlins’ retrofitted football field did have some quirks that the locals embraced. The thirty-three-foot-high left-field wall, known as “the Teal Monster,” was the second highest outfield edifice in baseball, shorter only than the Green Monster in Boston. Meanwhile just to the left of the center-field wall was an outfield gap known as “the Bermuda Triangle” where the wall veered away from the plate at a dramatic angle, from 410 feet to 434. After struck balls disappeared into this notch they were almost certain never to return. Okay, we were just kidding; they returned but usually not until the batter was standing on third base with a triple.

Joe Robbie Stadium’s conversion actually began quite a while before the Marlins debuted in 1993. The initiative to bring a team to the Miami area gained momentum in early 1990 when Blockbuster mogul H. Wayne Huizenga announced he would spearhead the city’s quest for a team. For good measure, Huizenga purchased half of Joe Robbie Stadium, and 15 percent of the Dolphins. The effort to convert Joe Robbie into a facility capable of hosting baseball began in January of 1991. But it wasn’t until June of that year that baseball commissioner Fay Vincent confirmed that South Florida and Denver had been selected by the expansion committee. Oh, what a feeling for South Florida. The longtime Spring Training hub and once bustling minor league hotbed would soon have a big league team of its own.

Early minor league teams that thrived in South Florida had colorful names like the Miami Magicians and Miami Beach Flamingos. The Fort Lauderdale Tarpons, meanwhile, came from the same school (bad pun intended) of thought as the Marlins, in netting a fishy moniker. While these teams played at small parks, after World War II it became apparent that a larger facility was needed to accommodate the growing baseball culture in the region, so Miami Stadium was built in 1949 by Jose Manuel Aleman, a former minister of education in Cuba. The beautiful nine-thousand-seat ballpark housed such teams as the Miami Sun Sox, Fort Lauderdale Lions, and West Palm Beach Indians. The first incarnation of the Marlins came in 1956 when Bill Veeck brought a Triple-A franchise to Miami from Syracuse, New York. Veeck signed aging pitcher Satchel Paige, who was delivered to the mound via helicopter for his debut. The bush league Marlins lasted only three seasons in Miami, however. Other minor league teams that enjoyed success in the area were the Miami Amigos, Miami Orioles, and Miami Miracle.

Josh:
I think the expansion team was smart to choose ‘Marlins.’

Kevin:
You’re not going to launch into another bogus fishing story, are you?

Josh:
My fishing stories aren’t bogus.

Kevin:
Well, they’re not exactly true either.

To the credit of all involved, at the time of its construction the funding for Joe Robbie Stadium came entirely from private sources. Mr. Robbie, who owned the Dolphins, spent $115 million to build the stadium, which he financed mostly through the leasing of executive suites that cost high rollers $30,000 to $90,000 a year. The stadium opened for football in 1987. Unfortunately, the Dolphins’ founder and stadium namesake died soon after the stadium opened in 1990. Shortly later, his estate sold the team to his onetime rival Huizenga. And Huizenga spent $10 million to retrofit the stadium for baseball.

The baseball modifications included a press box for baseball placed in the southwest corner where home plate would be. And a large, retractable out-of-town-scoreboard was built into left field with retractable baseball-only seating above it. Dugouts were dug out (as they should be) and a rubber warning track was laid. The pitcher’s mound was built like those in other multi-use stadiums, on a hydraulic lift that allowed it to sink and disappear when some stadium techie threw a switch.

Major League Baseball finally arrived in Florida on April 5, 1993. The ageless Charlie Hough threw the first pitch in Marlins history against the Los Angeles Dodgers before a sellout crowd of 42,334 at Joe Robbie Stadium. They might well have been the first team in big league history whose first pitch was a knuckle-ball. The Fish went on to win 6–3. But they finished their inaugural season just 64-98. Amazingly, they finished ahead of the New York Mets in the NL East standings as the non-expansion Mets went just 59-103 that year.

Pitching proved fruitful for the young minnows of the NL as Marlins starters authored a surprising number of no-hitters in the team’s early history. Al Leiter threw the team’s first no-no on May 11, 1996, when he whitewashed the Rockies at Joe Robbie. A year later, Kevin Brown turned the same trick on June 10, 1997, against the Giants in San Francisco. A.J. Burnett tossed the Marlins’ third no-hitter on May 12, 2001, when he walked nine batters but nonetheless beat the Padres 3-0 in San Diego. And Anibal Sanchez pitched the Marlins’ fourth no-no on September 6, 2006, when he beat the Diamondbacks 2-0 at Dolphins Stadium.

The Marlins were on the receiving end of a gem, when Phillies ace Roy Halladay tossed the 20th perfect game in baseball history before a crowd of 25,086 Marlins fans on May 29, 2010. In a classy move, the Fish fans cheered for the Philadelphia righty as he continued to mow down Marlins in the later innings and inched ever closer to making history. Another noteworthy event occurred at the Marlins’ home field on June 9, 2008, when Kevin’s boyhood idol Ken Griffey Jr. became the sixth member of baseball’s six-hundred-home-run club with a clout off the Marlins’ Mark Hendrickson.

Josh:
Was Junior really your “boyhood idol”? You’re practically the same age as him.

Kevin:
Yes, but like the Mariners, I took longer than usual to grow up.

Both times the Marlins won the World Series they joined the postseason party as the NL Wild Card. The 1997 team was led by imported talent like Bobby Bonilla, Gary Sheffield, Moises Alou, and manager Jim Leyland. The Fish swept the Giants in three stunning games to win the Division Series as clutch hits by Alou and Edgar Renteria helped win Games 1 and 2 and a grand slam by Devon White in Game 3 sent the little fish into a much bigger pond. But the pundits predicted that the upstart Marlins would be no match for the dynastic Atlanta Braves in the NL Championship Series. And the pundits were wrong. The powerful arms of rookie Livan Hernandez and Brown blew away the Sons of Ted Turner, as the two hurlers won two games apiece in the six-game set. Hernandez, who earned MVP honors, struck out a championship-series-record fifteen batters in Game 5 before a delirious home crowd of 51,982.

Next up for the Marlins came the Cleveland Indians and a World Series in which they would similarly defy the odds. Hernandez won two games, both over Orel Hershiser, becoming the first rookie to win two Series starts in more than fifty years. Memories of the climactic eleventh inning of Game 7 make Cleveland fans weep to this day. Renteria slapped a two-out single off Chuck Nagy to score Craig Counsell and break a 2-2 tie and give the Marlins a walk-off win. The Marlins had gone from expansion team to World Champions in five seasons.

The Marlins broke many records on their march to destiny. They became the quickest expansion team to win a World Series and the first Wild Card team to win one. And they came from behind in eight of their eleven postseason wins. Game 4 in Cleveland proved to be the coldest World Series game ever played, at 15 degrees Fahrenheit with the wind chill factor. Game 6 at Pro Player Stadium was played before the largest World Series crowd since 1954: 67,498 fans. The finale was just the third World Series Game 7 to go into extras. And the Marlins became the first team to draw more than half a million fans during a postseason, thanks in part to the extra games of the NLDS, and in part to the huge capacity of Pro Player.

However, the Marlins faced tough swimming ahead, as they became caught in the current of their own finances, city, and football-flavored field. After stocking the tank … we mean stacking the deck … with talent from the free-agent pool before the 1997 season, Huizenga auctioned off the team’s best players the very next year in a move that surely had legendary field manager Connie Mack smiling in his grave. Some players were lost to free agency, but most were traded away for prospects. In response, Marlins fans didn’t exactly stream into the ballpark the next few years. Having won his championship, Huizenga didn’t waste much time before selling the Marlins to the eccentric Henry in 1999. As mentioned above, Henry made his first priority constructing a new baseball-only park. But he couldn’t get the project across the finish line and ultimately decided to move on.