The Miami Marlins: Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before

Like all baseball writers, I have a splendid talent for being wrong. Hopelessly, fantastically wrong, over and over again. That’s how you’re supposed to write about baseball. You start with stupid and wrong, grab a shovel, and dig down from there. But even considering that, there’s no match for this winner of a column from a year ago.

Barf.

Not long ago, there was some concern expressed that the big ugly thing could make it difficult for left-handed batters to see the ball out of the hands of right-handed pitchers. We wrote about that, too.

But then recently we wrote about Jered Weaver possibly benefiting from Angel Stadium’s outfield rockpile during day games. The numbers suggest that Weaver’s strikeouts go up and his homers go down. In response, Drew Fairservice re-visited the Marlins Park issue. And that’s what I’m going to do here as well. Now we have some numbers that might show how a distracting backdrop could affect the batters. In Weaver’s case, the effect seems to be significant.

Miami Marlins president David Samson spoke before a group of Miami businesspersons on Tuesday, and according to Miami Today, it was something of a George Carlin rant without the humor.

“I don’t have to hold back now that the stadium is built — not that I ever have,” Mr. Samson said while addressing a group of about 75 people who came to hear him speak at a Beacon Council breakfast meeting.And he didn’t hold back, calling politicians stupid, declaring that “we’re not the smartest people in Miami,” and revealing that Jose Reyes would have signed with any team that was willing to pay him the most.

That’s the only thing that matters. You can see the early returns on this Flickr page. We’ve had our fun with the home-run structure -- oh, here, here, here, and here -- and it still looks like something that would appear on your TV after spilling milk on your Nintendo during a game of Battletoads. But we’ll get used to it, just as we did with the animatronic apple in Shea Stadium, or Rusty the Mechanical Man in San Francisco.

No, wait. Fans booed Rusty out of existence. But there’s still a 825-foot Coke bottle in San Francisco beyond the left-field wall. There’s a slide in the middle that kids can go down, thinking thoughts of glorious, glorious consumerism during their descent. Coke! And no one makes a peep about it anymore because we’re used to it.

The old park, Sun Life Stadium, was neutral. It cut into home run production from right-handed hitters, but it was well above-average for extra-base hits overall thanks to its doubles tendencies. It also increased strikeouts, and over the last three years did so by about 12 percent. Think of humid air as the opposite of Colorado’s dry, cool air. Breaking balls don’t have as much bite to them at altitude because the air is thinner, and there is less resistance. In southern Florida, though, the air is humid, and the frictional force created when a baseball moves through the air is stronger thanks to the higher air density. This causes batted balls to travel shorter distances, and gives pitchers more air resistance to work with in terms of the movement and bite on their pitches.

This back-and-forth between offensive gains and pitcher advantages resulted in a park right in the middle of the league in overall run scoring. The new stadium, Marlins Park, is going to be different enough to throw this balance off kilter.

So it is with... what’s the word? Irony? Bemusement? Glee? that I note that there might be a problem with the sculpture. Specifically, its location:

“It can no longer be there”? Seriously? The Marlins might be forced to demolish this kitschy structure, on which they spent untold numbers of dollars and about which incredible numbers of words have been written? Don’t worry, says Marlins management:

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I particularly like the terrifying voice of doom echoing through the park in the beginning. Cloverfield meets Gloria Estefan: Live in Atlantis.

But they’re not enforced. They’re given to the players by way of the teams’ goodwill, almost like a holiday bonus. The teams can always enroll the player in the Jelly of the Month club instead of giving them the raise. And the Miami Marlins aren’t even bothering with the jelly. From Ken Rosenthal and Jon Morosi:

The Marlins intend to automatically “renew” the contracts of virtually all their 0-to-3s at the new minimum, a move that might prompt the players’ union to file a grievance, contending that the team did not operate in good faith, sources say.The minimum increased from $414,000 to $480,000 with the new collective bargaining agreement, and the Marlins didn’t like that. So it’s minimums for all!

Amazin’ Avenue’s James Kannengieser rises to the defense:

Not necessarily every team? I think we have an early leader in the battle for Understatement of the Decade.

The Astrodome was a pretty miserable place to play baseball, as were most multi-purpose stadiums. It was still baseball. I grew up watching games at Candlestick Park, which was Hades’ chamber pot. When I think of all the baseball-related memories I have, though, I never once think of how dilapidated the park was. It’s not a big deal.

But a nice park can certainly enhance an experience, and the Marlins’ new park sure seems like it has a lot going for it. Nice sight lines, a retractable roof, intimate seating …

Over the weekend, I wrote an article titled “The Miami Marlins Are The Worst Thing Ever”, detailing my dislike for all things Marlins.

Michael Jong, proprietor of SB Nation’s Marlins blog Fish Stripes, penned a response to my feature, called The Miami Marlins Are Not The Worst Thing Ever, which is a reasonable reply coming from a Marlins fan.

And they’re not one of the nightclub acts you line up to see. No, they’re a faded 1970s lounge act, long after the genre lost its popularity, with a singer wearing an orange sequined jacket, singing Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby songs off-key while the lone waitress, whose hair long ago ceased to be blonde but has been frosted that way anyway, serves drinks to fifty-something men who are trying to pretend they don’t have combovers.

This is all to preface this post, which I freely admit is going to be full of unreasonable dislike of the team from Miami. I can’t stand the Marlins or anything they represent.

News broke late on Friday, December 2 that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had opened an investigation into the financing of the Miami Marlins’ new stadium. The Miami Herald reported that the SEC had issued broad subpoenas to the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County for all sorts of documents relating to the decision to publicly-finance the stadium, including communications with Marlins executives and representatives of Major League Baseball. Copies of the subpoenas can be found here and here.

The focus of the probe is believed to be three-fold:

This was going to be just a quick item. Via BTF’s Newsstand, I saw this fine piece about Houston’s Astrodome. Basically, there’s a giant building surrounded by parking lots and nobody knows what the hell to do with any of it. Sure, there are plenty of pie-in-the-sky proposals, all of them expensive and none of them anywhere near a good bet for economic or artistic success. Me? I love the building. But rather than see it slowly rot away, I would prefer they razed the thing, ripped out the parking lots, and constructed a lovely nature preserve in the midst of that suburban wasteland.

I’m funny that way, though.

The most anticipated part of the ceremony is the reveal of the Marlins’ new logo and uniforms. On the one hand, it’s suspicious that the Marlins have planned all this for so late on a holiday, as if they want to attract as few eyes as possible. On the other hand, good luck trying to arrange a Pitbull matinee. Pitbull doesn’t wake up until 4:45, according to my understanding of Pitbull’s day-to-day life, as conveyed by his lyrics.

The Marlins are being very secretive about everything, as one should expect them to be. However, while the official logo and uniform unveiling is still hours away, we’ve gotten some leaks. Of course we’ve gotten some leaks. This is 2011, and this is the internet. What do we have? First, the home whites:

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