Season opens with loud thud
MIAMI — The first pitch of the 2018 major league season wasn’t around long enough for anybody to appreciate it.
Chicago Cubs leadoff hitter Ian Happ yanked the fool thing into the right-field seats, putting the Miami Marlins in a hole with about 10 seconds elapsed in their latest major reboot. It’s been 32 years since the opening pitch of a new year has gone for a home run, and Boston’s Dwight Evans did it then, before most of these Miami players were born.
This sort of thing should not come as a shock, however, when a team’s motto for
the season is “Just Getting Started,” a sentiment that is written on the outfield wall and monotonously repeated in a new theme song for the season.
The Marlins, who feature 12 players on their first opening-day roster, truly are back to square one in their 25th season. The exercise of uncommon patience is required for all who visit Marlins Park, and manager Don Mattingly demonstrated for the umpteenth time Thursday how that is done.
When your starting pitcher has a four-hitter going, for instance, you stick with him, even if we’re talking about four hits in the first inning alone. Counted in that total were one hit by the Cubs, that being Happ’s homer, and three solid hits by Jose Urena, who plunked three Chicago batters and had everybody, including the umpire, flinching at the plate.
“His command was all over the place, but obviously we count on Jose being back to himself,” said Mattingly, who has no real ace and no better options.
This 8-4 loss to the Cubs, as a matter of fact, will serve as a lesson to every Miami player, because even though Urena progressed from opening-day jitters to opening-day amnesia, completely forgetting how to throw a strike, he still managed to battle for four full innings, which is longer than Cubs starter Jon Lester, a four-time All Star, lasted.
Perseverance, that’s the ticket out of this hole, and that also applies to Derek Dietrich, who through the default of former Marlins stars sent elsewhere in an offseason salary dump finally gets the chance to be a regular in the Miami lineup. He hoofed out a triple Thursday, sending a ball to the left-field wall and benefiting from Kyle Schwarber’s clumsy efforts to find it and corral it.
Schwarber has a way of making up for his mistakes. Consider the 400foot homer he hit off Marlins reliever Tayron Guerrero. The Cubs won 92 games last year because of things like that, while the Marlins, who no longer have Giancarlo Stanton to put a scare into pitchers, will need everything to go right in order to stay under 92 losses.
Maybe you heard about Stanton hitting a tworun homer Thursday in his first at-bat with the New York Yankees. He does that a lot, and the Cubs did, too, against Miami, getting three homers and four doubles off Mattingly’s best arms. It was enough to negate a scrappy Marlins rally to tie it at 4, but not enough to make Miami’s on-thejob trainees feel like less than major leaguers.
When you are in the starting lineup and there’s a military flyover above the stadium and opening-day bunting draped along the railings, you have arrived. Too early, too late or right on time, it makes no difference in a player’s mind.
“This is a very mature team even though we’re very young,” said rookie Lewis Brinson, who went 0 for 5 in his first Marlins start. “The spirit is there. We have a lot of confidence in ourselves that we’re never out of a game. We’ve got a lot of heavy hitters in here and a lot of guys that get on base and make some things happen on the base paths. And obviously, our defense and pitching is going to be there.”
Sounds like some other team, to be honest, but there’s no use in the Marlins talking themselves down. Everybody else is taking care of that.
On Thursday, new CEO Derek Jeter worked the other angles, taking his turn before the cameras in the Fox Sports booth and the ESPN booth and saying things like “We want to turn this into an entertainment venue. That’s our focus.”
Fourteen dancing girls took the field in the middle of the third inning to further that goal. A pregame concert featuring
D J Khaled brought some star power, too. Through it all, an announced crowd of 32,151 stayed fully engaged through a game that featured 17 hits and the usual thick concentration of cheery, cheering Cubs fans.
Marlins Park can be a loud and joyful place under the right circumstances, as proven by the World Baseball Classic carnival that blew through here and the 2017 All-Star game.
“We’d love to have this place packed every day and have the advantage every time you walk out there, playing in that environment,” Mattingly said. “We will compete. Our fans will get to know these guys and they’re going to like them.”
When the first pitch gets splattered, you keep making pitches, for support and for understanding. Former owner Jeffrey Loria wasn’t very good at that. With Jeter and company, we’ll just have to find out.