Marlins or Merlins? Magical, miraculous season continues
We have reached a notable touchstone in South Florida professional sports history when the Miami Heat reaching the NBA Finals, one season after not even making the playoffs, is not the most remarkable story in town. Or even close to it.
The Miami Marlins are the impossible dream come true, the feel-good sports story of surreal, pandemic 2020 — the new standard for “No way! You’re kidding.
You want an example for the ages that anything really possible. We have the new one, and if any team can top this, have at it.
The Marlins lost 105 games last season, the most in the National League.
They began this truncated MLB season in the deep throes of a ground-up rebuild after trading stars for prospects.
Their preseason odds to win the World Series were 30,000to-1, dead last.
Oh, and when play finally started in July, the Marlins were embarrassed to have so many players test positive for COVID-19 that eight games in a row had to be postponed, so decimated was the roster.
This is the interloper in the postseason.
Must be magic. Call ’em the
Miami’s best-of-3 series at the Chicago Cubs starts Wednesday.
“It hasn’t really hit home yet,” third baseman Brian Anderson said. “All the guys have been through so much, whether on the field or off the field. It’s been the craziest season I’ve ever been a part of. Going from
a team that lost 100 games to one going to the postseason — that’s something we’ll have for the rest of our lives.”
The short series and the Marlins’ strong young starting pitching led by Pablo Lopez, Sixto Sanchez and Sandy Alcantara give the underdogs a shot.
But, heck, Miami could lose two straight and still have had a season that should win Don Mattingly manager of the year honors and also give Marlins fans new faith in the rebuild being engineered in the third year of the ownership fronted by Derek Jeter.
The 31-29 record made for the Marlins first winning season since 2009 and first postseason since 2003. Yes, there are the twin asterisks: the shortened season, and expanded playoffs. But neither should lessen Miami’s accomplishment.
“People will try to discount what we did,” Anderson said, “but we had one of the toughest schedules in baseball.”
As the 60-game regular season was about to begin we asked ESPN’s baseball expert Tim Kurkjian if the truncated schedule gave under-radar teams a better chance.
“Yes. It favors mild contenders, our sub-.500 teams. It at least gives them an opportunity,” he said. “Even if you’re not a real good team, you can play pretty well for 40 or 50 games, maybe even 60. It’s the 162 games that wears you down. Nobody fakes it through 162 games.”
So even the Marlins have a shot? Kurkjian scoffed. Whatever a scoff sounds like, he did it.
“Look I’m not a complete idiot, OK?” he said. “The Orioles, the Tigers and the Marlins are going to the playoffs, I don’t care if the season is
games long. Those teams are in a major rebuild. In a major rebuild you cannot be good for 60 games. Sorry, Marlins fans. The talent level just doesn’t match up.”
We asked Marlins shortstop and captain Miguel Rojas the same question on the eve of the season. From him, no scoff.
“The future here in
Miami is really bright. I feel great about the future of this organization,” he said. “We have a lot of talent. I feel very, very good about the pitching staff. I’m not ruling the Marlins out at all. Our offense is going to be so much better than in the past years. Whoever gets hot ... we can be that team! That’s a real thing. Why not us to get hot? We could be in the playoffs!”
Kurkjian sounded dispassionately logical and could not have been more wrong about the Marlins.
Rojas sounded like a player saying what any player might say — but could not have been more right.
This was Mattingly, the manager, back in February, on the eve of spring training, just before the global pandemic blew up everything:
“It’s time. It’s time to turn the corner and get this thing rolling in the right direction.”
Done.
Playoffs.
“You can feel [the change in culture] more than you can see it,” Mattingly says now. “It’s an exciting time.”