In the decade since Jeffrey Loria bought the Florida Marlins, no major-league team has drawn fewer fans. The fact that the Marlins have played all their home games in the Dolphins’ football stadium, which seats seventy-five thousand, only underscores the indignity. Last August, during an afternoon game that had been rescheduled in anticipation of Hurricane Irene, an enterprising Marlins fan completed a lap of the grounds and counted only three hundred and forty-seven spectators, including him. He tweeted his tally along with the comment “Still not the smallest crowd I’ve seen here.” The team typically claimed season-ticket sales of five thousand in recent years, although David Samson, the Marlins’ president, and Loria’s stepson by a former marriage, freely concedes that was a lie. “It was always two thousand,” he told me, and later estimated that, by this standard, the Marlins not only were the least popular baseball team (“by three standard deviations”) but ranked a hundred and twenty-fifth among pro sports franchises nationally, below all the hockey teams, and below even a handful of minor-league teams.
They are now the Miami Marlins, as a result of a deal that Loria and Samson struck with Miami-Dade County politicians. The politicians got their city’s name attached to the unloved local baseball team; and the Marlins got about five hundred million dollars to help pay for their new ballpark, in Little Havana, on the site of the former Orange Bowl. The deal may have cost the former Miami mayor Carlos Alvarez his job—he lost a recall election spurred by a Tea Party billionaire—and the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into the stadium’s financing. But, on a morning in late February, Loria arrived at the Marlins’ spring-training complex, in Jupiter, eighty miles north of Miami, with the untroubled look of a man whose lifelong ambition was finally being realized. The stadium wasn’t just any old luxury-box conduit he’d succeeded in building; it was a lasting work of architecture, a contribution to the skyline of a major American city, “in the spirit of Richard Meier,” he said. “Lots of glass, lots of steel, beautiful white surfaces everywhere, curves, things that delight the eye.”
Loria, who is seventy-one, has a strikingly broad face that accentuates the tautness of his bronzed skin, and narrow eyes that are cautiously delighted. He grew up in Manhattan, graduated from Yale and Columbia Business School, and made a fortune as an art dealer, specializing in twentieth-century paintings and sculpture. While still in his twenties, he wrote two books, “Collecting Original Art” and “What’s It All About, Charlie Brown?,” a kind of precursor to “The Tao of Pooh.” Baseball was his other passion—he was All City as a second baseman, at Stuyvesant High School, in the late nineteen-fifties—and in 1989, in his middle age, he bought a minor-league team in Oklahoma City. Next, he upgraded to the Montreal Expos, but he failed in his attempts to get public funding for a new stadium there, and left the team on the cusp of extinction when he traded up for the Marlins, who quickly won him a World Series ring, in 2003. The fans remained skeptical.
In Jupiter, Loria stopped to lean against a chain-link fence near one of the practice fields. He greeted people coming and going, corrected their grammar (“You haven’t ‘run’ that fast, not ‘ran’ ”), and used a towel to swat at a persistent insect. His mind seemed partly elsewhere. “You walk into that ballpark and see it, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, my goodness,’ ” he said, and began describing a towering mechanized sculpture by the Pop-art all-star Red Grooms that had been built to enliven the outfield backdrop. “It’s only going to be activated when somebody hits a home run on our team. There are two marlins that spin around. One dives into the water while the other’s exiting the water—a great splash of water. Another marlin goes straight up to the top of the sculpture and spins. There are flamingos that flap their wings. There’s an L.E.D. light show. There’s music. There’s a pair of doves that fly in opposite directions. There’s—what’s the word?—a cacophony of things going on.” He didn’t mention the tropical aquariums that have been installed behind home plate, or the outpost of a South Beach hotel lounge, the Clevelander, under construction next to the bullpen in left field. Who could have predicted that the man often blamed for killing the Expos would prove to be the second coming of Bill Veeck?
“I think it’s important for people to use their eyes and to be entertained,” Loria went on, describing the unlikely convergence of his two great loves. “Baseball is an entertainment business in many ways.” He was wearing a black cap with the team’s new logo—a rainbow-colored “M,” with a flourish resembling a marlin’s dorsal fin and bill—and explained that the uniform redesign, in which he played an active role, had been two years in the making. “The colors did not just come arbitrarily,” he said. “The red-orange is for those incredible sunsets. The yellow is the sunlight that you see during the day. The blue is the water that surrounds the community.” Goodbye, teal. The colorscape at the new Marlins Park, meanwhile, was “sort of an homage to Miró’s palette,” Loria explained. “The outfield is all green—Miró’s green.”
Loria gazed out at his players, several of them newly acquired in a rare splurge to accompany the relaunch. (“After years of shopping at the Dollar Store, they decided to go down to Neiman Marcus,” Josh Friedman, a Miami radio commentator, told me.) “Whether it’s a collection of paintings or a group of talented athletes, it’s about making them all fit, making them juxtapose against one another and work off one another and complement one another,” Loria said. There, off in the distance, fielding grounders, was his new shortstop, the ex-Met Jose Reyes, to whom he’d just committed a hundred and six million dollars, helping to complete an “all-Latino infield,” as he put it: fitting for Little Havana. Immediately to Reyes’s right was Hanley Ramirez, the team’s former shortstop, who was less than happily moving to third—Jackson Pollock switching to a brush for the good of the gallery. “I pointed out to him that it was an opportunity to be an All-Star at two positions.” The second baseman Omar Infante passed by and nodded shyly. “Vacuum cleaner,” Loria said. “Shffff! What hands!” The veteran lefty Mark Buehrle, a new addition to the starting rotation (fifty-eight million), teased the owner from the batting cage, inviting him to practice bunting. “I feel like a father with twenty-five kids,” Loria said.
Here, too, came the voluble new manager, Ozzie Guillen, arguably the most heralded of the new hires. Guillen, talking boisterously with an assistant coach, introduced a coarser tone to the proceedings. “I heard you say the F-word,” Loria chided.
Guillen ignored the remark, slapped his boss’s hand, and patted him on the shoulder several times. “If I get this man to where he should be, it gonna be a raise,” he said.
Loria lifted his eyebrows. “The World Series?” he asked.
“Oh, no, that’s up to them,” Guillen said, and turned to look back at the players on the field.
“Oh, so they should get the raise,” Loria said.
“I get paid to win World Series,” Guillen continued.
“O.K.,” Loria said, verging on impatient. “So just do it.”
Guillen shook his head. “They gonna do it,” he said, and gestured at the field again. “My job? Hey, listen, if I get involved in the game more often, that means we’re horseshit. See, I stay away from them? That means we winning.”
“Good.”
“Be smart,” Guillen said, before disappearing into the clubhouse. “Make sure Ozzie’s not involved during the game. As soon as I start making moves, I might fuck it up.”
“It’ll never be boring with him,” Loria said.
Guillen reappeared sometime later with a fungo bat, which he used to play an imaginary round of golf behind the backstop. “I guess Loria’s in town,” he announced, after noticing an assistant who was filming batting practice. “Everybody’s working. Jeffrey just show up, and everybody has something to do. Look, I got a fungo in my hands!” He released the bat, laughed, and rested his arms on the backstop, next to the cameraman. “This is the best job,” he said. “Do nothing.”
Guillen is forty-eight and still spry by managerial standards, although he has consumed enough vodka and Budweiser—“I drink a lot, bro”—to obscure any trace of his welterweight days as a Gold Glove shortstop. (“You hit .220, you better catch that shit,” he likes to say, selling his career average short by forty points.) His mustache has expanded into a goatee, and his habit of protruding his jaw, in mock incredulousness, can give him the aspect of a bulldog. He is a born performer—he says he sometimes wishes he had become a toreador instead of a ballplayer—and one of his recurring acts is to call into question what a major-league manager actually does to earn his paycheck (two and a half million dollars a year, in his case). “This is not instructional league,” he said this spring. “We not teaching here.” He’s not strategizing, either, if he can help it. “They don’t have to play my style,” he argued. “What’s any manager’s style?”
Nor does Guillen pore over his roster in an attempt to familiarize himself with personnel. “A lot of people say I’m un-fucking-prepared,” he volunteered one afternoon in his office, and did little to dispel the notion, shuffling distractedly through some papers on a fake-mahogany desk that he deemed too big for his purposes by at least seventy-five per cent. “I no like this desk,” he said. “This is overrated.” He required only space enough for his can of dip tobacco and his scented candle (peach cilantro, to counteract the clubhouse stench). His audience wanted to know who would be pitching, where, and when. Guillen finally shrugged and said that the pitching coach was next door—why not ask him? “That’s why you got fucking guys there as the coaches.”
In simple terms, Guillen’s job is to talk—to provide the soundtrack for Loria’s visual delights. In his eight years managing the White Sox, before signing with the Marlins, last fall, he became the sport’s prime magnet for microphones and tape recorders, even if half of what he said was unintelligible or unfit to broadcast. (He is sometimes said to speak neither English nor Spanish, “just Ozzie.”) His candor endeared him to the beat guys, if not always to his bosses, to whom he seldom deferred. And his willingness to expound on open-ended questions, of the “tell us what you saw out there” variety, helped distract journalists from bothering his players, who were often grateful. Not that Guillen has ever hesitated to rag on his players if the mood strikes. “You see Buehrle pitch spring training?” he’ll ask. “Better go look at the minor-league system. It can be pretty ugly. It’s gonna feel like, Oh, my God, who did we sign?” Guillen revels in his honesty. On his twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, a few weeks ago, he was asked by his twenty-six-year-old son, Oney, how he was planning to celebrate. “I’m going to fuck your mom very well tonight,” he said.
Earlier that day, I had watched practice with Oney, who explained his father’s blunt nature and quick wit in terms of his upbringing in Venezuela. Guillen’s parents divorced when he was nine, and he was more or less adopted by a man who happened to be the uncle of the Hall of Fame shortstop Luis Aparicio. He quit school, and left Venezuela at sixteen, speaking little English and weighing less than a hundred and fifty pounds. “He said, ‘I have to be loud, because if I wasn’t I wouldn’t be noticed,’ ” Oney told me. “It’s crazy. He goes, ‘I don’t even speak good English, and they’re paying me a shitload of money to go talk on ESPN.’ ” In Venezuela, Ozzie Guillen has become something of a national hero.
At one point, Ozzie buzzed past us in a golf cart and yelled, “Eyewash!” The players were lined up behind home plate and taking turns running to second, legging out would-be doubles. “Those guys know how to run the fucking bases,” Oney said, translating for me. “ ‘Eyewash’ is basically: You’re not really doing anything important—you’re just pretending to do something. You just want other people to look at you.” It was a common refrain of Guillen’s, I learned. Four- and five-hour practices in February, such as the Marlins had endured in previous years, were just for show: eyewash. (Unlike in Guillen’s own playing days, professional athletes now work out year-round and require little conditioning to return to form.) Banning alcohol in the clubhouse, as the Red Sox had just done, in an act of public atonement for last September’s sodden collapse? Eyewash. (“They will drink somewhere, somehow.”) Guillen’s embrace of free speech was nearly matched by his distaste for pomp. One had to wonder if high-concept uniforms and flapping flamingos didn’t fit the criteria as well.
A number of minutes passed with no sign of the manager’s returning. “See, my dad went inside and Joey’s doing all of this,” Oney said, referring to Joey Cora, the former second baseman and Ozzie’s best friend, who was using a fungo bat to conduct an infield drill. “Right now, he doesn’t have a TV in his office, so he’s probably just sitting there. He likes to eat popcorn. He got an iPad—he just likes playing dominoes on it.”
Eyewash or no, thoughts of branding were inescapable in Jupiter. Loria and Samson had agreed to let their overhauled team be the subject of Showtime’s documentary series “The Franchise,” and welcomed production crews to camp with no restrictions. “I make it very clear to the players, ‘Hey, that’s the way Marlins gonna be,’ ” Guillen explained, after a team meeting in which the open-door policy was laid out. “ ‘Be not a bore. Just show the people from the front office you’re not a bore.’ ” Easy for some: Jose Reyes, Hanley Ramirez, and the center fielder Emilio Bonifacio took to calling themselves the Dominican Trio, and perfected a series of handshakes and gestures while hitching rides around the practice fields on a golf cart. By early March, Bonifacio’s ritual of forming a sideways “V” over his eye and shouting “Lo viste?” (“Did you see that?”) had been merchandised, with a shipment of T-shirts bearing the team’s new slogan. Martha Stewart was photographed performing the gesture with Loria and his wife at an event in Miami.
Others, like the outfielders Logan Morrison and Bryan Petersen, were more proactive. Not content with mere supporting roles, they decided to film their own reality series, “The Petey and LoMo Show,” for SBNation.com’s YouTube channel. Last year, Petersen started a production company, Legit Films, back home in California. (He also keeps a skateboard and a Trader Joe’s bag above his locker.) Morrison is the team’s leading tweeter—aside from Guillen, that is, who was once fined by the league for posting during a game—with ninety-seven thousand followers. “Both of us are pretty creative guys, I guess you’d say,” Petersen told me. “The premise of the show is what big-leaguers do when they get bored in spring training.” They formed a Vespa-riding gang, the Dirty V’s; freestyled to Justin Bieber’s “Never Say Never”; vandalized a house rented by some teammates; and, in keeping with the new Marlins spirit, attended ArtiGras, Jupiter’s arts festival, where they engaged in a painting competition.
The cleanup hitter formerly known as Mike Stanton, a.k.a. Bigfoot, announced on Twitter that he would henceforth be answering to Giancarlo, his given name, prompting confusion on the copy desks of the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post. Leo Nuñez, the team’s closer for the past three seasons, was also going by his given name, but this posed a problem of another order. His proper name, it turned out, was Juan Carlos Oviedo; Leo Nuñez was a childhood friend in the Dominican Republic whose identity he had borrowed in order to appear younger. The State Department has yet to issue him a visa to return to the United States as his true self. Guillen liked to joke that, if and when the legal situation was resolved, he’d be blessed to have thirteen pitchers with only twelve bodies: “We gonna have Nuñez in the seventh and Oviedo in the eighth.”
Heath Bell, the new closer, and a self-proclaimed “idiot” (“I’m kind of like Ozzie, but a player”), spent some time in the early goings contemplating a change of entrance music, to suit his new surroundings. “Can’t just be, like, the new groove,” he said. “See, a closer’s song has to fit that person and it has to fit that moment. That’s the way I look at it.” With the Padres, he used “Blow Me Away,” by Breaking Benjamin. “I’m known for that song out West,” he said, and added that he’d been distressed to discover that his brand was not strong in the larger East Coast media markets. “It’s, like, ‘Have you not seen me pitch for the last three years?’ ” If Bell was knowingly channelling Kenny Powers, from HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” he didn’t let on. “If you ever heard the song, it talks about saving us all, and it’s got bells ringing in the background, so it’s kind of like ‘Hell’s Bells,’ but it’s not. My last name’s Bell, so I kind of like bells.” On second thought, he was thinking of just sticking with it. “Might be a little different spin, but the song’s pretty much the same,” he said. “If the season goes good, I might mix it up. On throwback days, I love to play Anita Ward: ‘Ring My Bell.’ ”
And then there were the Guillen boys, Oney and Ozzie, Jr., pimping Dad’s brand for their marketing agency, Triple Crown, and overseeing his Web site, OzzieGuillen.com, where the manager blogs occasionally under the tagline “Listen up, I’ve got a lot to say!” (A third son, Ozney, is a sophomore on the Miami Dade College baseball team.) Ozzie, Jr., is twenty-seven and getting used to the fact that he is now older than many of his father’s players. “Everyone gets to be their own character,” he told me, after running wind sprints with some relief pitchers who had dared him to keep up. “That’s the best thing in any work atmosphere, that people get to be themselves.”
Oney likened his father to the bombastic New York Jets coach Rex Ryan, another profane cable-TV star, and said, “Baseball needs more people like that—charismatics. Society and sports have become so watered down.”
About a week into camp, Ozzie, Oney, and Ozzie, Jr., were pulled over by a state trooper while driving south from Jupiter to Miami. “Three Mexicans in a car—that’s not a good thing,” Ozzie later joked. “Guy chased me for maybe two miles. I was ready to fucking blow. ‘I’m behind a truck. Why the fuck you stop me?’ ‘Where are you coming from?’ ‘Jupiter.’ ‘Oh, I knew it was you, Ozzie! How you doing? My nephew is gonna be there today.’ ” The officer asked for an autograph, and sent them on their way. So maybe there were Marlins fans out there, after all.
Forty thousand people, in fact, turned up at FanFest, which is where the Guillens and, evidently, the cop’s nephew were headed. It was the public unveiling of the new ballpark, which seats thirty-seven thousand, and there were autograph signings and town-hall-style meetings with the players and management. Shortly after I arrived, I heard a man exclaiming, “Look at that. Look how big that is!” He had just ascended the spiral ramp to the concourse level and caught a glimpse of the “home-run feature,” as the Red Grooms sculpture has come to be known. It’s impossible to miss, looming as it does some seventy-two feet above the wall in left-center field, in bright pink, yellow, and green. I’d seen it described on blogs as “psychedelic” and an “acid trip come to life,” but my flashback was to Candy Land.
David Samson, the club’s president, met me on the concourse and led me on a tour of the perimeter, stopping occasionally to pick up litter. Samson is the public face of upper management—Loria likes to sit in the front row, but otherwise maintains a low profile—and he seldom moved twenty feet without receiving feedback from strangers: “Mazel tov.” “This must be what Paradise looks like.” “We waited for this for years and years.” “For the record, you did the right thing, waiting all this long. Now you have a product. I would not have spent one penny at the other stadium. Seriously, man, you’re a very good businessman, contrary to what everybody says.”
He took the jabs in stride. “We could have had a new ballpark open in 2005, with no roof,” he told me. “It’s just not worth it.” There was no roof above us now. The popular notion of Florida as all sunshine and beaches comes from visiting one’s grandparents at Christmas, or from spring break, with weather of the sort Samson and I were enjoying: breezy, clear skies, seventy-five degrees. Samson wore his blue oxford shirt unbuttoned to the chest. In the summer, it rains just about every evening, and the humidity is enough to stifle most ambitions to go out, which is why Marlins Park has a retractable roof and a giant sliding window facing east, toward downtown. Ask a Marlins player to name his favorite thing about the new building and the chances are that he’ll say, “Air-conditioning.”
“We’ve been called a small-market team,” Samson said. “It’s absurd. We were a low-revenue team. Miami’s not a small market by any stretch.” He pointed out a concession specifically designed for children, with a lower counter, and a sweets station (“It’s Miami—people love candy”). Other revenue-generating efficiencies were less immediately visible, like the ability, with digital technology, to target different demographics. “We have companies who don’t want to advertise the same thing to people on the upper deck that they want to advertise to people on the main level,” he said. “So picture a car company. They have a certain brand of car that they’ll advertise on the vista level, and another kind of car that they’ll advertise down below. And that’s the same with Pepsi.” Research shows that Hispanics prefer more sugar in their drinks, so a majority of the soda fountains at the Cuban-sandwich counter, say, will pour regular Pepsi, while the other fountains are more diversified, with Pepsi Max and Sierra Mist.
A woman wearing Marlins gear (new and old) approached Samson with a suggestion about installing high tables, near the concessions, where customers could eat hot dogs before returning to their seats. She was a season-ticket holder, a probable Sierra Mist drinker. He was unpersuaded. “If we do tables, there’ll be people who actually hang out for multiple innings,” he said. “We want flow.” He gestured at a stylized art installation mounted on the wall above them, depicting the history of the Marlins franchise through iconic players and moments: from the gray-haired knuckleballer Charlie Hough, floating the first pitch, in 1993, to the catcher Pudge Rodriguez, hanging on to the ball in a bracing post-season collision, in 2003, and on up to the sensitive star Hanley Ramirez, following through on a home-run swing. “People will be here, and they’ll look this way at the art, and then move on to the next piece of art,” Samson said, demonstrating as he spoke. The woman rolled her eyes. “People who are coming to the game, they don’t want to see the art,” she said.
Samson waited for the philistine to move along, and then continued, “Watch what happens to the art. See, you have to walk. See how it’s moving? It’s 3-D. It’s called ‘Baseball in Motion.’ Remember all the talk in the off-season about us trading Hanley? We knew we weren’t trading him, because he was in this piece of art.” He added, “We don’t mind criticism. It starts with Jeffrey. Artists are generally not famous until they’re dead.”
I wanted to see the aquariums, so we ducked into an elevator with Mark Buehrle, who must outweigh Samson by at least a hundred pounds. (Samson’s not a tall guy; in Montreal, he was sometimes called Little Napoleon.) Buehrle waited for the doors to close and then body-checked Samson into the wall. “Hey, this is a new elevator,” Samson said. “Dude, first blood!” Buehrle replied.
Down at field level, Buehrle took refuge in the Marlins’ clubhouse, which is dark and plush and features nine leather recliners—a lineup’s worth—with drink holders on both arms, arranged in an arc around a bank of televisions the size of scoreboards: a man cave amid all the campy modernism. Samson led me out onto the field, where the aquariums’ manufacturer was removing blue tarps from the backs of the tanks. There are two of them, each holding four hundred and fifty gallons and stretching from the dugouts to just behind home plate. “I’m the guy who would spend his whole allowance throwing Ping-Pong balls to win goldfish at the state fair,” Samson said. “I figured, we can put brick, we can do padding—how boring!” In early February, the team invited a camera crew from National Geographic to watch the first baseman Gaby Sanchez throw a ball as hard as he could at the tanks, demonstrating their shatterproof design. “Didn’t even make a scratch,” Sanchez told me. “I was standing pretty close and I wheeled it.”
Samson seemed to notice me squinting to find the small tetras and angelfish swimming around the coral. “This is only the beginning of the fish,” he said. “These are the starter fish.”
“People here get excited about fish behind home plate,” Ozzie, Jr., said, a few hours later. “Come on. It’s a fishtank!” He was getting restless after listening to too many inane questions during one of the town-hall portions of FanFest, and beginning to remember why he had once told a Chicago sports columnist that Miami was “the fakest place in the world.”
But there were perks to the glitz. Soon a female television reporter appeared in the dugout, in heels, looking for players to interview and turning heads on the field. “You don’t get that in the Midwest,” Ozzie, Jr., conceded. “That’s some ‘Monday Night Football’ stuff right there.” He excused himself to go find out her name.
The Guillens were still adjusting to life at the center of the circus, as observers had lately taken to calling the new Marlins project. Ozzie, Sr., too, had dismissed Miami as fake last summer, at a time when he was angling for a long-term extension from the White Sox, which he was denied. Back in Jupiter the next morning, Guillen reflected on FanFest with his coaching staff, and brought up one of the questions he’d heard, about how many World Series titles it would take for the Marlins to rename the new building Ozzie Guillen Stadium. “I win one championship, you never gonna see Ozzie Guillen again,” he said, as his players began stretching. “Soon as I gonna win this thing? Baaah. Done!” Last fall, he’d travelled to Barcelona, and now, in spare moments, he thought of returning. “Bringing baseball to Spain gonna be my next job,” I heard him say. “Just fly me there and I talk baseball Monday to Friday. Saturday, watch bullfights.”
The Showtime crew left camp (they’ll be in and out all season), and the initial media rush to capture the new arrivals in their new duds subsided. “This it?” Guillen asked one day, when the pack of reporters waiting for his monologue had shrunk noticeably. “It get boring already?” Yet boredom, in spite of the Marlins’ mission, is baseball’s constant, its great equalizer. “Every month is one boring game, two, three boring games,” Guillen admitted to me. “That’s gonna happen, because that’s part of the season.” The baseball season is longer and more relentless than that of any other sport, with few days off; six weeks of preliminary spring training only aggravates the condition. A local TV reporter, dropping in for the first time, noticed the scented candle on Guillen’s desk and asked if it was a calming device or an indication that he had mellowed. “Fuck that, man,” Guillen replied. “I never be calm. I be Ozzie Guillen.”
Guillen sometimes likened the Marlins’ new situation to that of a hobo who’d been living under a bridge for twenty years suddenly winning the lottery and using his windfall to build a gaudy mansion. He also said, “Can’t wait till the fucking games start—at least we can talk about how horseshit they are.” He meant the players.
The Marlins played their first game in the new ballpark, an exhibition against the University of Miami Hurricanes, a few days after FanFest. The outfield smelled of wet paint, and I soon realized that a large swath of the center-field backdrop had turned black. Several Marlins had complained that they wouldn’t be able to pick up the ball coming out of a pitcher’s hand against the brightness of Miró’s green. Some left-handed batters had gone even further, and grumbled that the Red Grooms sculpture posed more of a potential distraction. What if they were to face a right-handed submarine-ball pitcher, in the Dan Quisenberry mold? They’d be forced to cast their eyes to the left of the mound, in the direction of the pink flamingos. “If it is an issue, it can no longer be there,” the utility man Greg Dobbs told the Miami Herald’s Clark Spencer. The sidearm reliever Ryan Webb dismissed such talk as a “hitter’s problem,” adding, “There’s also a fishtank behind home plate. If I get caught looking at that, I’m not going to make a good pitch, am I?”
During batting practice, David Samson assured his special assistant Jeff Conine, the former Marlins first baseman, that the blacked-out patch—the so-called batter’s eye—was currently bigger than Major League Baseball requires. “Why don’t you put, like, these swirly things on the outside, like pinwheels, and have them move with the wind?” Conine replied, sarcastically. “All about the fan experience.”
The sculpture cost two and a half million dollars to build and install, the equivalent of Ozzie Guillen’s salary. It wasn’t going anywhere—and, alas, it wasn’t fully operative. A live inspection of the light show, with spinning marlins and flying doves, would have to wait until April. But its presence introduced some complications to the usual ground rules which required elaboration. “You’ll see a yellow line underneath the waves to the right of the sculpture,” Samson said. “There is a triangle of concrete there. If the ball hits that concrete, it’s a home run. But if it hits the top of the circular padding of the home-run feature, and bounces back in play, that’s in play.” Two high-school teams had played here in a “soft launch” the night before, and the umpires had found these quirks sufficiently confusing that they were granted permission just to wing it, in the hope that teen-agers wouldn’t hit the ball that far. “By the way, someone’s going to have to crush it to bounce it off the feature,” Samson said.
A series of what sounded like ringing gongs quickly proved that assertion wrong. The roof was open and the sliding window closed, creating an unanticipated wind effect, with the easterly breeze seeming to double back on itself. The balls were soaring, in some cases out into the concourse and in others into the Grooms. “Samson’s pissed,” the catcher John Buck said. “Ballpark isn’t big enough.” Buck and another catcher, Luke Montz, were trading moon shots, dinging the sculpture a few times each. “Like Buck said, it feels like you’re going to get yelled at for hitting Grandpa’s barn with a ball,” Montz said, a little sheepishly.
Guillen arrived late, and missed the impromptu home-run derby. “The fucking roof is going to be closed every time,” he said later, after learning of the wind pattern. “We come here to win games. We don’t come here to look good.” Half of the Marlins had stayed behind in Jupiter, to play an afternoon game against the Detroit Tigers. Guillen saw that game through—a loss—and then caught a ride to Miami. No cops this time. He speculated that his unsung predecessors would have been left to drive themselves, but “me, Ozzie Guillen? Had a limo.”
The sky darkened, as a wall of clouds blew overhead. The roof began to close—it takes thirteen minutes—and narrowly beat the rain. Batter up! Mark Buehrle was on the mound, in his first appearance as a Marlin. He looked sharp, contradicting Guillen’s disparaging jokes by making quick work of the Hurricane batters in the first two innings, but then he loaded the bases in the third, and yielded a double down the line, past a diving Hanley Ramirez. This resulted in the first standing ovation at Marlins Park, which was in support of the visiting team.
I slipped out of the press box in the fifth, in order to meet John Routh on the concourse level, behind home plate. Routh seemed as good an authority as anyone on the vagaries of local fandom. He was the original team mascot, Billy the Marlin, and served in that punishing role for ten seasons, eventually making eighty thousand dollars a year, until Loria and Samson arrived and decided that his younger understudy was ready for a promotion. “My motto back then was ‘Sacrifice the body for the laugh,’ and I’m paying for it now,” he said. “I got two bad knees, a bad back.” Now in his early fifties, he is the executive director of the University of Miami Sports Hall of Fame. He had attended the game with his friend Wes Lockard, the original Burnie, the mascot of the Miami Heat.
Lockard excused himself to take some pictures of the ballpark, and Routh reminisced about the time he’d wound up, inadvertently, in the pages of the Herald, photographed sitting in an unpeopled section of bleachers, in costume, with his feet up, reading the paper. “The club was like, ‘O.K., stay out of the empty sections,’ ” he said. “And I remember one time Mike Lowell was batting, and he kept hearing a phone ring behind him. He literally stepped out and said, ‘Will you answer that?’ Because it was that quiet.”
There was a loud ping—the college kids were using aluminum bats—and a rush of action on the field, as two more Hurricanes rounded the bases, reclaiming the lead for the visitors, in the sixth. “We could be seeing history here,” Routh joked. “I think the last time the university beat a major-league team was back in ’82 or ’83. We beat the Orioles.” The inning ended, and a voice over the loudspeaker said, “Hey, fans, look who’s here. It’s South Florida’s favorite fish!” Routh’s replacement appeared on the field near third base, wearing baggy rainbow-colored pants and a similarly colorful mask. “It looks kind of like pajamas,” Routh said of the new costume. (A blogger for the Miami New Times has called this iteration of Billy “out and proud.”) There was no sign of either the Mermaids or the Manatees, dance troupes who often performed on the tops of the dugouts, and Routh mentioned that he’d heard that the Manatees—overweight men who had jiggled their ample bellies—had been discontinued.
“Unfortunately, that’s kind of what South Florida is,” Routh went on. “ ’Cause we don’t have a long history, like St. Louis and Chicago, where people really love baseball. People want to be entertained here.” He checked his watch: nine o’clock. “And, like, you’ll see, people are already starting to leave.” ♦
