South Floridians were able to cheer a division-leading, first-place professional sports team at home Tuesday night. Ordinarily, this would not qualify as news, let alone a revelation, but the recent rarity makes it so.
Not to suggest Vegas oddsmakers are scrambling to reset their World Series lines based on a stout half month, but the Marlins are the best thing we have down here right now on the pro landscape. The fact it might not last is all the more reason to savor it while it does, or dare say support the merry possibility that it actually might.
So where were you, South Florida? Where are you?
I go to any Marlins game vowing to ignore the crowd, to not make the lack of one my focus. But it is tough when you look out and try to reconcile a team doing all it can -- better than expected -- and being seen by row after row of unpopulated seats.
On a cool Tuesday night, they announced a paltry gate of 10,462 at Dolphin Stadium to watch a 4-0 victory against the Atlanta Braves that kept the Marlins improbably atop the NL East. It was the team's return following a 4-2 road swing, against a division rival, and with ace Scott Olsen polishing a gem.
Good for those loyalists who showed up. To the rest of you who allege to care about the Marlins but consistently show it by absentee ballot: Please begin to figure out what you require beyond a competitive, fun, easy-to-like team to make you the sort of fan who actually goes to games. Have you set your watch for Opening Day 2011 in the new ballpark?
Do you only deign to attend playoff games?
The Marlins have the market to themselves now; we enter a time when interest should be coalescing and reflect in better attendance. Losing is forever the fail-safe explanation for poor crowds. What is the excuse now?
The mesmerizing TV fare of college basketball's March Madness is finished.
Panthers hockey ended, unadorned as always by a playoff extension.
The Heat conclude the worst season in franchise history Wednesday night -- the end as merciful as the humane bullet that ends the crippled horse's suffering.
The Dolphins and football Canes don't start playing for four months. It is baseball season, people, and the Marlins are doing something we've forgotten all about down here.
Winning. Against odds, expectations and logic: Winning. From the entire Marlins roster, only Hanley Ramirez is the envy of other teams.
Other franchises consider the entire Florida payroll as loose change under the sofa cushion. If you think of baseball expenditure in human terms, with the Red Sox and Yankees as Bill Gates and Donald Trump, the Marlins are the guy at the intersection wearing a cardboard hat and bumming spare coins.
(The only thing smaller than Florida's payroll is its number of African-American players. That would be zero on the 25-man roster. Which is why, on Jackie Robinson Day Tuesday, commemorating the anniversary of his major-league debut in 1947, the Marlin wearing Robinson's No. 42 was third-base coach Bo Porter).
Florida's payroll is less than half the next lowest, making even a brief or temporary stay atop the division all the more remarkable.
The meager payroll gives these Marlins an everyman feel, an intrinsic underdog quality, a likability missing in our other pro teams.
The Heat is not likable. It is the ultimate underachiever, the champion who got fat and coasted and somehow finished this season with the NBA's worst record.
The Dolphins are not likable, maybe less so now with autocrat Bill Parcells. We will love them again when they win; meantime, they have become faceless save for the defensive end who may or may not be traded and is presently dancing the Vienna waltz on TV.
The Panthers might be likable. But when you last won a playoff game in 1997, your plain irrelevance tends to overwhelm anything else.
These Marlins are doing more with far less than any of their brethren. This team scraps, wins with invention and bailing wire.
No epic home run bat remains in the lineup since the sale of Miguel Cabrera, just four or five guys who together flip the power switch on pretty good.
No scary ace dominates the staff, just a handful of guys who might or might not give you six decent innings.
The setup relievers are household names only in their own households. The closer, Kevin Gregg, with those thick, black-frame glasses of his, looks like a cross between Clark Kent and Dudley Doright. But from this Spartan mix arises a team somehow leading its division.
Huh? How? The defense is still subpar. They still strike out too much. They traded away their two signature stars in Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis. They are dead last in the NL in team ERA.
Yet in these early days of the longest season the Marlins are one of the good little stories in baseball and quenching a victory-parched South Florida.
The hometown's attention is cordially invited.
