For Marlins, a home opener and first place in mid-August. Can this year get any weirder? | Opinion
Oh my how the Miami Marlins tried. Did everything they could to make their much-delayed first home game of the season Friday night feel special. Only in baseball does Opening Day get capital letters, and so for their return to Marlins Park — finally! — they hung red, white and blue bunting and even called the full team to the baseline for pregame introductions.
Like it was April.
Like everything was the same.
When absolutely nothing is.
The jumbo video screens were lit and the PA announcer enthusiastically called out the Marlins to a sea of 37,000 empty blue seats.
Manager Don Mattingly has been in 31 big-league home openers as player, coach or manager, and he wasn’t even going to try to pretend.
“I know it’s a home opener, but it doesn’t feel like much of one,” said Donnie Baseball via a remote Zoom hookup, de rigeur now for coach and athlete interaction with media. “It’s another game, honestly. It ends up being a regular game.”
Well, not that, either, though. Not in a time when hardly anything in 2020 is regular, in sports or in life.
That includes the Marlins themselves, more happily for Mattingly.
His team unexpectedly held onto first place in the NL East with an 8-2 home-opening win led by Pablo Lopez’s eight-strikeout, no-walks gem. One month ago Lopez, 24, was grieving the sudden death of his father to a heart attack. Now he’s a big reason why Miami is an unlikely feelgood story in MLB.
“We were eager and excited to come home,” Lopez said. “A really fun game all around.”
Clutch hitting, speed, great base running including another steal of home, a pair of highlight-reel defensive plays in left field by Matt Joyce -- all of that happened on a night that would have set the ballpark rocking, had there been fans in it.
“A well-rounded game for us,” Mattingly understated it afterward. “Kind of got contributions from all over the place. Speed is a difficult thing to deal with. The bats are coming alive.”
(Can it be real? The Marlins look good).
The Fish became the first South Florida pro team in more than five months — in 156 days, since March 11 — to play a home game that actually was at home, following a 24-day, 12-game road trip to begin the delayed MLB season. It was the latest home opener by any team in the sport’s 144-year history.
(The Marlins packed for a week on the road to start the delayed season but were gone more than three weeks. How’d they get by? “Wear the same clothes,” said third baseman Brian Anderson, smiling. “Anything you can do to get by without smelling too bad.”)
A prerecorded national anthem played before the home opener; no players knelt. Fake crowd noise was piped in. A large display reading “Black Lives Matter — United for Change” hung beyond the center-field wall. A pregame video honored frontline healthcare workers.
The coronavirus/COVID-9 pandemic that is ravaging the country did the same to the Marlins, with 18 players and three staff testing positive and still away from the team as Miami embarked on its maiden homestand against the NL East rival Atlanta Braves with the New York Mets on deck.
There were cardboard cutouts of the 18 missing players positioned behind the Marlins home dugout Friday night, an eerie sight befitting in an eerie tableau.
The big things not there anymore — huge crowds, loud cheering — have turned our sporting events into hollow facsimiles of themselves, a sketch where the painting once was, a silent film, a pantomime
This is what playing games in a pandemic looks like. Like a sports apocalypse.
It is the littlest things that you notice and miss.
Now, foul balls carom and clatter across empty seats and aisles, no fans there to chase them. The baseballs roll to a random stop, prizes left unclaimed.
No vendors are here to call “Beer here!” or send bags of peanuts cartwheeling to outstretched hands.
I miss the sight of 6-year-olds wearing too-big ballcaps, and old men keeping a running boxscore with pencils.
Billy the Marlin is at this first homestand, but it was a forlorn snapshot: An 8-foot mascot, shuffling alone through empty stands. Wearing a mask.
The bizarre circumstances (“Unprecedented times,” said CEO Derek Jeter) override everything about sports right now, and one of those things is the Marlins’ surprisingly promising start to this truncated 60-game season — made doubly impressive by the COVID-depleted roster and playing the first dozen games on the road.
The weekend Braves series was for the division lead. Miami in first place in August? Give Mattingly the manager of the year trophy right now. America’s Team! (Why not?) They’re magic: the Miami Merlins!
Heck, the season will already be a quarter done after Sunday. Miami’s strong start means something. It means the young, rebooting Fish have a shot at the playoffs. They have given themselves a chance to have a chance.
“They’re all big series,” said Mattingly of the short season. “It’s kind of pennant race baseball. It’s the best.”
The Marlins are the team at the center of a pandemic hot spot and most decimated by the virus — yet against odds they’re winning, one of the feelgood stories in sports as summer chugs into fall.
“Just trying to take everything as a positive,” said Anderson of the team’s mind-set, “and roll with the punches.”
No team has been hit harder, or gotten back up better.
