Clearly, what Chicago needs is an expansion baseball team, one of those unscarred, untarred franchises, a team so fresh it still has its baby baseball shoes hanging from the rearview mirror of the team bus, one unembarrassed to wear incompatible pastels, one that celebrates its first postseason victory as if it has just won the World Series.
All of that will do, as well as a spare $89 million, none of it to be frittered away on anyone named Belle or Bell, Albert or George.
Immaturity worked briefly two years ago for the Colorado apprentices and now, here in the land of the sand flea and the strip mall, the Florida trainees are taking their turn in the baseball playoffs.
The Cubs have socks and the Sox have cups older than either of those franchises.
The best wild-card team money can buy tiptoed past the San Francisco Giants Tuesday, 2-1, while the aforementioned Sox once again were changing chauffeurs.
“If people can’t get excited about a game like that,” said Florida starting pitcher Kevin Brown, “you better check and see if there are some cadavers walking around.”
Burial might be an acceptable excuse for the 3,000 or so empty seats at Pro Player Stadium, but the Marlins went ahead and won the first postseason baseball game ever played in Florida anyhow, for those present, absent and confused about what baseball was doing here heading into October. This is just a bit early for spring training.
“Did anyone ever think this would happen?” asked Jeff Conine, one of only two original Marlins remaining on the team, making five years sound like several lifetimes.
The term “long suffering,” practically part of the Cubs’ letterhead, means late for lunch around here.
When every pitch is a fresh frontier, each player a pioneer, achievement can be self-exaggerating, so a ninth-inning, two-out, game-winning single by Marlins shortstop Edgar Renteria is treated like the delight it deserves to be.
“Si, si, si,” said Renteria when asked if this was the thrill of his life.
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It isn’t as if, at only 21, Renteria has a wide resume of comparison.
Renteria was lifted to the shoulders of Marlin outfielder Gary Sheffield and paraded around the field like Joe Carter was when he won the World Series for Toronto.
“We still have to win two games,” reminded manager Jim Leyland, both a realist and a mathematician. “They have to win three.”
Victim of Renteria’s joy was none other than relief pitcher Roberto Hernandez, who, had he stayed on the White Sox, might have been losing to the New York Yankees instead.
This must have been just the sort of thing Jerry Reinsdorf meant when he dealt Hernandez, Wilson Alvarez and Danny Darwin to the Giants. You have to be crazy to think the Giants can beat a team that spent so much more money to be where they are.
Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga forked over about $89 million to add 13 new players and a manager of pedigree, loading up with the likes of Moises Alou and Alex Fernandez and Bobby Bonilla, and then extending Sheffield’s contract to $61 million. Huizenga had to admit at midsummer that even as one of the wealthiest men in the world, he can’t keep losing $30 million a year.
Huizenga now may sell the Marlins to a group with much more shallow pockets who will have to peddle some of these highly paid heroes just to stay in business.
However far the Marlins go–and Atlanta surely will be waiting out there–this could be the best and last shot for the young franchise. Even Leyland can leave if the team is sold.
During the off-season, the Marlins momentarily did consider making Albert Belle the centerpiece of their ambition, but they were ultimately able to resist paying Belle the $10 million a year he wanted, leaving him for the Sox and Reinsdorf at $11 million.
The rest is history, for the Marlins, brief, for the Sox, typical.