It is a measure of the history of the Florida/Miami Marlins that Sunday feels like the third-biggest day in franchise history. It wasn't, but this is what happens when your franchise has two World Series victories and seven other playoff games in 33 years. That third spot on the podium remains very much available.
Still, you take your moments when you can, and this is the Miami Marlins' moment. The moment in question being when the Marlins swept the New York Yankees at home before 101,000-some-odd announced mammals over the weekend to get their once-dismal record to a deliciously mediocre .500, and in so doing moved within hailing distance of the final wild card spot. That last thing doesn't seem like much, and it probably isn't, but the Marlins' fan base has decided that the Yankees are their archrivals despite the fact that Yankees, who are in a different league, barely acknowledge that the Marlins even exist. Yankees fans weren't even sure the Marlins existed in 2003 when the Marlins beat the Yankees to win their last World Series.
But you know what Bill Veeck used to say: "It may be puppy love to you, but it’s a big deal to the puppies." The Miami Marlins, who used to be the Florida Marlins and have played in ProPlayer, Sun Life, Land Shark, Marlins, and now loanDepot Parks, and who used to be run (spectacularly badly) by Yankees icon Derek Jeter, have been trying to make Miami care about them for two decades now. Their dearth of results and Miami's warrior-like indifference to the presence of a Major League Baseball team within city limits have prevented a groundswell of anything except more ennui. It’s inspiring, in a way.
Something happened to the Marlins six weeks ago, though, and nobody can put their finger on it, mostly because most people have better things to do with their fingers. Without the benefit of a trade or miraculous minor-league promotion, the team started winning—an eight-game streak here, a four-gamer here and there, a five-gamer now, all of which got them back to even after having once been 16 games under .500. They did this behind the contributions of the following megastars:
- Kyle Stowers
- Agustín Ramirez
- Otto (OTTO!) Lopez
- Xavier Edwards
- Eury Perez
- Anthony Bender
- The no-longer awful Sandy Alcantara
- And the elegantly named Janson Junk.
Other than Ramirez, who is a candidate for NL Rookie of the Year, none of these players will be mentioned for awards except for Otto Of The Year, where Lopez is miles ahead of the Phillies' Otto Kemp. But in the last six weeks, the Marlins have the second-best record in baseball behind only the sorcery-powered Milwaukee Brewers, and reached their zenith to date this weekend against those one-way bêtes noire, the Yankees. And it went better than any Marlin fan had a right to expect or even hope.
Friday night, the Marlins overcame a 6-0 mid-game deficit by decimating the Yankees' new blue-chip bullpen acquisitions Jake Bird, David Bednar, and Camilo Doval for nine runs in two-and-a-third uproarious innings. The game lasted 3:43, and nobody seemed to mind. On Saturday, they gave the audience an entirely new theatrical production by having Perez and three relievers shut out the dreaded Northern scum, 2-0; the entirety of the scoring offense and half the team's total hits came on two Ramirez homers off Yankee starter Cam "Say This Five Times Fast" Schlittler. On Sunday the Marlins battered Luis Gil, the much-valued Yankee starter just back from a lat strain incurred in the spring, and famed Yankee stalwarts Brent Headrick and JT Brubaker for six runs over the first four innings, then cruised behind Cabrera to a 7-3 victory. These wins make the Marlins the only team in history to have a winning lifetime record against the Yankees, provided you count that nettlesome World Series. Which, again, falls under the puppy love rubric.
More importantly, though, they did all these things in front of their three biggest crowds of the year, against the only team that ever draws more than 30,000 to [Your Brand Here] Park. With the exception of 2012, when they moved to their new taxpayer eyesore ballpark, the Marlins have finished dead last in MLB in attendance in every year since 2006. (We exempt the existence of the Oakland/West Sacramento Athletics, who started actively discouraging people from coming to their games three years ago and are therefore the Charlestown Chiefs of baseball.) Very little moves the needle for this franchise in terms of public interest except the Yankees, Opening Day, and the odd giveaway.
As we said, the Yankees stir a passion in Miami that nothing else does, not even the Dolphins (for obvious reasons) or Panthers (very good but still arrivistes, and besides they do their winning in Broward County, not Dade, a difference Floridians understand viscerally). To forcibly thump the most recognizable brand in the sport, even in a weekend series in earliest August, is a genuine triumph for a franchise that has largely been cheap, bad, and ignored. And nothing sells better than novelty.
We are about to get a sense of how much this weekend meant to the flimsy bond between the Marlins and their fans, as they will host Houston tonight with Alcantara pitching. The Astros are not a marquee team, really, save for their brief flirtation with brigandry. But they are a playoff-level team with a top-eight record, giving the Marlins and their fans the illusion of another big series; they are 10-1-1 in their last 12 series, which is an actual thing to managers. Thus there is the thin possibility that the tenuous but budding relationship between the local ball team and the locals will continue to grow, at least a bit. Expect nothing much, of course. The Marlins didn't start drawing as many as 20,000 a game in their World Series year until September, because belief is for saps and the beach is right there. But any potential momentum is better than stasis with a side of slow deterioration. Ask any puppy.
