This past July 23, Sirius/XM’s Dino Costa assured his several dozen listeners that the Marlins’ rush to dump Anibel Sanchez and Omar Infante on Detroit was no cause for alarm and it was simply a matter of time before South Florida’s baseball fans — previously disguised as acres of empty seats —- eventually embraced Jeffrey Loria and David Samson’s garish team and stadium.
Fast forward some 18 weeks later, and it seems that only does one blatant fire sale deserve a couple more, but the good people of Miami are about as likely to appreciate what Loria’s done for their community as the residents of Cheyenne, WY are to thank Costa for what he’s done for theirs. The pending 12-player exchange between Miami and Toronto would send SS Jose Reyes, RHP Josh Johnson, LHP Mark Buehrle, catcher John Buck and utility man Emilio Bonifacio north of the border for the modest haul of homophobic eye-black enthusiast Yunel Escobar and a half dozen other barely breathing human bodies. Simply because the Marlins have fewer serious fans than Costa has legitimate Twitter followers, that does not make Loria’s machinations any less sickening or cynical. Once upon a time, Bowie Kuhn put the kibosh on Charlie Finley’s efforts to dispense of highly paid talent, but if you’re waiting for Bud Selig to take a similar stance in this day and age, you’d have better luck selling Escobar a blu-ray disc of “The Birdcage”. In the considered view of
Faith & Fear Flushing’s Jason Fry, ” Loria is a shambling colony of amoral excrescence disguising itself with the skin of a human being”
They are flesh-eating mosquitoes surrounding an orphanage in some ruined part of the world, bred by cannibals laying land mines. Not only that, they are the worst collective entity the world will ever see.
The Yankees have values, and a code built from those values that they live by. To be sure, they’re twisted and evil values, ones that teach their fans that the appropriate soundtrack for the death of decency and fair play is laughter echoing throughout the icy halls of an empty palace. But, well, they’re values. The Yankees stand for something, however reprehensible that something is to good-hearted people.
The Marlins? They stand for nothing. They embody the void — nihilism given terrible shape as a franchise, devouring everything touched. The Marlins are the entropic cackle that greets the death of everything.