It’s a special Opening Day as Miami Marlins welcome back cheering crowd, feeling of hope | Opinion
Baseball fans will flock to watch the Miami Marlins play a home game Thursday. They will cheer and buy hot dogs. The ballpark will be decorated in red, white and blue bunting. The umpire will shout “Play ball!” and Sandy Alcantara will begin his windup on the pitcher’s mound.
All of the little stuff, the normal stuff we took for granted and missed, is coming back to us by degrees. Crowds at games. Sweet noise. The communal of fans.
It is Opening Day in America. It will feel a little like a re-opening.
The Marlins’ 29th season of Major League Baseball unfurls with a six-game homestand starting Thursday vs. the Tampa Bay Rays, and it will be the semblance of a real Opening Day for the first time in two years, after last season was delayed, truncated and tossed upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fans were last at the former Marlins Park on September 22, 2019. They will return to find it newly renamed “loanDepot park” now because the Marlins this week, like most franchises across sports, agreed to sell a little bit of their soul for the added revenue stream of corporate naming rights.
[Quick aside to fans: The Marlins might now be obliged to use the name of the California-based mortgage company that inexplicably does not capitalize the word ‘loan’ in its name — but you aren’t. Feel free to keep deploying the familiar, simple and perfectly descriptive “Marlins Park.” And yes, the “p” in loanDepot park is lowercase.]
More than the park’s name has changed in a year.
About 9,000 fans, or 25 percent of capacity, will be allowed at home games by local health and safety protocols, after none were last season.
It isn’t a “return to normal,” yet. Maybe far from it, considering that, just days ago, Centers for Disease Control director Dr. Rochelle Walensky admitted a sense of “impending doom” over fears of another surge in the pandemic. And that was after dangerously massive recent spring break crowds on South Beach embarrassed Miami-Dade County.
The limited return of fans in baseball is progress, though. That’s something.
A year ago a COVID-19 outbreak hit the Marlins harder than any other team at the season’s start, delaying games and wreaking havoc with the roster.
Manager Don Mattingly used nine different starting pitchers and 27 different pitchers in all in the Marlins’ first nine games, unprecedented in MLB history.
Mattingly joked earlier this spring it would be exaggerating only slightly to suggest he was meeting some pitchers for the first time when he walked to the mound to make a pitching change.
“There were at least four pitchers that we had zero idea what we’d get,” he said.
From that early chaos and upheaval the miracle Marlins somehow finished the shortened season 31-29 for the first winning record since 2009 — ending a 17-year playoff drought. Mattingly was named NL manager of the year in a waltz.
He returns for a sixth season as Miami’s longest-tenured manager as the ownership regime fronted by Derek Jeter digs in for its fourth year.
Fresh air sweeps into the franchise as fans return.
The ground-up roster makeover that emphasized a restocked farm system is reaping dividends as Kim Ng (pronounced ang), takes over as a ceiling-shattering Asian American and the first female general manager in MLB history.
“Failure is not an option,” Ng likes to say.
The trail-blazing Ng is easy to root for, and so is a burgeoning team whose strength is starting pitching led by Alcantara, Pablo Lopez, Elieser Hernandez and Trevor Rogers -- with the splendidly named Sixto Sanchez poised for a fast callup.
The lineup gets a jolt with young Jazz Chisholm winning the starting second base job and proven bats including Starling Marte, Brian Anderson, Corey Dickerson, Miguel Rojas and newly acquired Adam Duvall.
The Marlins are on the rise.
Fans can feel genuine optimism about the club’s direction for the first time in seemingly forever.
And yet none of that jibes with low outside expectations.
It’s almost as if last year’s turnaround season in the maelstrom of a pandemic never happened at all.
Miami’s self-described “Bottom Feeders” (after an opposing radio guy called the Marlins that) made it all the way to the NL Division Series last year but it might as well have been a mirage.
Miami finds itself in the toughest division in baseball in the rugged NL East, where the big-spending New York Mets and always strong Atlanta Braves lead the way in projected wins this year and the Washington Nationals and Philadelphia Phillies also are seen as better than the Fish.
Miami’s projected win total over the planned full 162-game season is in the 68 to 72 range. The Marlins could be competitive, improved, and still finish fourth.
A big reason: Spending, or lack of.
While the Mets have the third-highest MLB payroll in 2021, the Phils and Nationals also are top 10 and the Braves are above the league average, too, the Marlins’ payroll is 27th, outspending only three of 30 teams.
Spotrac.com says Miami’s payroll will be $47.2 million; other estimates are closer to $60 million. Either way, that’s egregiously below average and less than one-third of what the Mets are spending.
A year from now, the Jeter regime will have no excuse to not spend big and augment its burgeoning farm system with top free agents.
The new loanDepot park naming rights, a reworked television deal doubling that revenue and the return of (limited) fans give the franchise three major money-making avenues it did not have last season. That needs to turn into competitive spending in both free agency and existing players for Miami to grow the momentum it generated last year and compete in the tough NL East.
Meantime, hope is justified.
It is Opening Day, fans will be there, and that sweetest familiar old noise — cheering — will fill the ballpark.
That’s good enough for now.
This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 12:03 PM.
