![]() “Nothing against this place, but it’s a football stadium.” “I am ecstatic that the Marlins are moving,” said Chipper Jones, who played 121 games at Joe Robbie Etcetera Stadium. It also has air conditioning and a sliding roof to eliminate South Florida’s subtropical weather as a drain on attendance and players. The 75,540 seats made crowds look even smaller, which is one reason the new ballpark has only 36,000 seats. “It’s funny when you start seeing fans and recognize them and know them by name.” “We’d go out there and hear crickets,” Ross said. Visiting fans often outnumbered Marlins rooters. Cameras caught two spectators making love - they were that comfortable with their sense of privacy in the upper deck. Turnouts of less than 5,000 were common, with so much elbow room one fan collected three foul balls by the fifth inning, then left. ![]() This season Florida will finish last in the NL in attendance for the seventh year in a row. It was amazing.”īut when the Marlins failed to field a contender, which was most of the time, the majority of seats sat empty, their tangerine color louder than the crowd. ![]() “You can’t duplicate it anywhere else in baseball, because nowhere else could hold that many people. “There is no sound like this place full with 65,000,” Conine said. People don’t come to a game all year, but they’d dress up and come to the World Series.” I suppose it was fur-coat time, I don’t know. “For the World Series, we had 67,000 people. “We weren’t really anybody’s team because there were so many people that came from other places that cheered for their team,” Leyland said. Jim Leyland, the manager in 1997, remembers attendance swelling late in the season as fans - some of them winter-only South Florida residents - jumped on the bandwagon. There was a World Series championship in 1997 capped by an 11-inning walk-off victory in Game 7 against the Indians, and baseball fever returned with an improbable run to another title in 2003. No one complained about it in 1993, when the expansion Marlins drew 3 million fans. “I remember we couldn’t wait to go on the road.” ![]() “You’re talking about the worst conditions,” former Marlin Cody Ross said. Turf worn down by the mix of baseball and football made for unpredictable bounces - just last week, Braves third baseman Chipper Jones lost a grounder in the lights. A black cat wandered by the Marlins dugout during a recent game, and if the place wasn’t cursed, it certainly was cursed at. The ballfield has been especially unsightly lately, with a Dolphins logo behind second base and faint yard lines providing reminders that multipurpose stadiums fell out of favor for a reason. “It’s not the worst place I’ve ever played,” Phillies ace Roy Halladay said during his final visit this month. The sentiment is shared by visiting players, even the pitcher who threw a perfect game last year at Joe Robbie Etcetera Stadium. And so the final game Wednesday against the Washington Nationals will be cause for celebration and a chance to say good riddance. Over the past 19 seasons, the Marlins discovered people dislike sitting in a football stadium to watch baseball games played in sweltering weather and interrupted by frequent showers. “There were a lot of rain delays,” former Marlin Josh Willingham said, “and no fans.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |