I have been a fan of some spectacularly bad baseball teams over the last 50 years, but after only 28 games of the current season, the 1999 Florida Marlins are well on their way to establishing new standards of athletic futility.
We are talking world-class, Guinness Book of Records, Mariana Trench-depths incompetence here.
Worse than the Philadelphia Phillies of the 1940s who finished dead-last year after year.
Worse than the anemic Atlanta Braves of the 1970s.
Worse even than the undisputed all-time symbols of baseball futility, the 1962 New York Mets.
The ’62 Mets, it will be remembered, were a ragtag collection of discards from other teams hastily assembled to restore New York to the National League after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had defected to California in 1957. Managed by the legendary Casey Stengel and embraced by the city’s baseball-starved fans, the Mets bumbled to a 40-120 (fortunately, two games were cancelled) record in their inaugural season, the most pathetic in history.
Don’t look now, Marlins’ fans, but our Floundering Fish are on pace for a 35-127 season that would knock the ’62 Mets right out of the record book.
Even more painful to contemplate, the current Marlins are not only chronic losers, they are uninspiring losers. The ’62 Mets may have been atrocious, but they were funny and entertaining, like the adorable runt in a litter of otherwise similar puppies.
Unfortunately, the young, inexperienced and mostly minimum-wage Marlins have all the personality and charisma of a roomful of ribbon clerks. Touted as a scrappy bunch of emerging stars in pre-season hype, they have played so far like awed and overmatched minor leaguers whose potential has been wildly overestimated by management.
New owner John Henry can’t be blamed for this no-win situation. Neither can General Manager Dave Dombrowski nor Manager John Boles. This team is still locked in the death spiral that began one week after the ’97 Series when previous ownership began unloading the talent at fire-sale prices.
South Florida fans can’t be faulted for choosing not to pay major-league ticket prices to watch the Marlins’ nightly exhibitions of non-competitive, unentertaining on-the-job training.
There is another ironic similarity between these Marlins and the ’62 Mets. When the Marlins won the 1997 World Series in only their fifth season of existence, they displaced the Mets, who had won the 1969 Series in their eighth season.
In the interest of historical perspective and journalistic research, I attended my third Marlins’ game of this rapidly deteriorating season Wednesday and watched them lose their eighth in a row and 11th in a 13-game home stand to the not-so-formidable Milwaukee Brewers, 2-0. The Marlins have lost all three games I’ve seen in person and have been shut out in two of them.
By this time next week, they may well have broken the club record for consecutive losses (11, achieved twice last season) and attained another eerie parallel with the ’62 Mets, who had losing streaks of 9, 11, 13 and 17.
The Mets finally yielded to the inevitable and turned their maladroitness into a marketing gimmick.
They invited fans to create large bedsheet banners and parade them around the ballpark.
Among the more memorable first efforts were “Know why the Mets are such good losers? Practice makes perfect” and “You may be down on your cans but you’re first with the fans.”
By August, the Marlins may be reduced to staging a banner day, if any fans still care enough to make the effort.
It was only 18 months ago that the Marlins electrified South Florida with late-October lightning, but for the region’s long-suffering baseball fans, it now seems almost to have happened in another lifetime.
