All Marlins are Fernandez on emotional night
MIAMI — The biggest Marlin spoke in a whisper, and his teammates gathered close in a circle beside the pitcher’s mound. They were silent. Some of them, young and strong, teared up.
This was just before Monday’s first pitch of the Marlins’ 7-3 victory over the Mets, and Giancarlo Stanton said something just for his teammates, something surely about the emotion in this night.
They then raised their arms to the sky as one. “One, two, three...” Stanton said. “Jose!” They were all Jose Fernandez on Monday night. All the Marlins. All of them wore No. 16 jerseys. All had “Fernandez” on back, rather than their own names, in honor of their teammate killed in a boat crash early Sunday morning.
All these Jose Fernandezes running on the field was the most remarkable sight amid the most horrible news in the most emotional game you never want to see again. How do you play with a broken heart?
“I don’t know,” manager Don Mattingly said in the dugout before the game. “I just don’t know.”
In pain. In tears. In shock.
That’s the answer, and it describes everything from the Marlins and New York Mets meeting on the field for a group hug before the game — a warm and touching moment — to Dee Gordon’s first swing.
Gordon hit his first home run of the season. The left-handed leadoff batter had taken the first pitch from Bartolo Colon while standing in the right-handed batter’s box — a clear salute to Fernandez.
Gordon then became a picture of the full night as he proceeded to break down, crying, as he rounded the bases and reached home plate.
He was bawling, really. Teammates hugged him. Some were crying themselves, Christian Yelich sitting down and putting his head down in his hands.
The home crowd in Marlins Park delivered a polite, gentle applause during all this that lapped over the field like a warm wave rather than the celebratory noise such an opening home run normally merits.
This, to be sure, wasn’t a night of baseball as much as a night of mourning. Of remembering. Of coming together as a sports community for the first time since Fernandez’s death and dealing with pain as well as possible.
So fans came with tears and flowers. They sold out Fernandez caps and jerseys in the team store to the point a line formed to have “Fernandez” ironed on jerseys. Another line of fans waited to sign a wall outside the stadium adorned with Fernandez’s number and jersey.
“You made baseball fun!” Gigi Smathers wrote.
“‘Jose Day’ is Every Day,” Ramon Gutierrez wrote.
“Your passion will live on,” Tricia Robertson wrote.
Inside the park, before the game, Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria and superagent Scott Boras were in tears talking about Fernandez to separate groups just 15 feet apart from each other.
Here’s the most unsettling part of all this: We’re still in the first inning of dealing with Fernandez’s death. Marlins president David Samson was asked about retiring Fernandez’s number.
“That’s Step 526,” he said. “We’re at Step 19.” (Loria, by the way, said no Marlin will wear No. 16 again.)
And that’s just it. There’s a long way to go. At some point, after the funeral’s over and the crying stops, there will be the practical question of how much this loss sets back this baseball franchise. Three years? Five years?
Nothing is normal now. Nothing fair. In the world that once was, Greg Jones planned to come to work Monday, file the clay down by the pitcher’s rubber and make the dirt at the bottom of the mound extra hard. Fernandez was scheduled to pitch Monday. It was a “Jose Day.”
Instead, the Marlins groundskeeper carried three cans of paint to the mound late Monday afternoon. He painted in a “16” on the back of the mound. A memorial.
“He owns that mound,” Jones said. “He’s still with us right now. Everyone in this organization feels that way.”
You just had to see the players to feel that. Every Marlin was Jose Fernandez this night. Wearing his jersey didn’t stop the tears or subtract the pain. It felt right, though. For the first time in two awful days, something actually felt right.