Marlins Should Be Packing Their Bags For A Real Sports Town

The Florida Marlins motto on their local TV commercials is “It’s Where You Wanna Be.”  But for the people of South Florida, it’s the last place they want to be.  The Florida Marlins are 29th in attendance in the MLB averaging 17,906 tickets sold per game, battling the Oakland Athletics for the worst crowd turnouts in the league.  While fans have the right to choose whether or not they want to support a team, these fans have no interest in getting behind the wildcard chasing Florida Marlins.  What’s worse is they do not even get fair coverage on television.  ESPN rarely puts the Marlins on television even though they’ve been more successful in their short lifespan than the Chicago Cubs, Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, New York Mets, and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the past two decades.  The Marlins have won two World Series championships since 1997, which is an excellent accolade considering how difficult it is to get in the playoffs in the MLB.  To top it off, the Fish have won with a minimal budget compared to teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, who have four times the salary.

Marlins fans packed the building during the playoff runs when they captured their World Series titles in 1997 and 2003, years in which the team won the wildcard to get into the post-season.  However, the regular season is a completely different story.  There are times when it appears there are less than 6000 fans in attendance, especially during rain delays.  The actual turnout of the Marlins is usually around 9000 fans out of the approximately 17,000 seats sold.  The Marlins broadcasters rarely ever talk about attendance numbers and when they do they rarely mention the poor turnouts; only the numbers on the rare weekends when the Mets or Yankees come to town and fans come out of the woodwork to support the New York teams.

The front office flirted with the idea of moving to Texas and Las Vegas, however, they finally got a deal in place to build the new stadium in downtown Miami designed to hold 37,000 with a retractable roof.  Does management honestly think a stadium with a new roof is really going to magically make all these people go to the games?  Unlike the movie “Field of Dreams,” ‘build it and they will come’ theme, expect to be able to hear fans voices echoing off the walls and cotton candy vendors trying to identify a section where there are some actual fans in the seats.

While a retractable roof and a new state-of-the-art facility might attract fans for a few months, once the smell of the new stadium wears out, it will be no different than the past decade of competing for the league’s lowest attendance numbers.

Why not move the Marlins to Orlando? How about Jacksonville? What about Birmingham?  At times it seems as if even Pensacola could come up with a better draw from the folks in the panhandle, lower Alabama, and Mississippi to watch baseball.  Why in the world are the Fish staying in South Beach?

Now I’ve heard all the pessimists in South Florida complain about the facilities and the fact the Fish play in a football stadium, but that doesn't stop people from showing up when the Yankees and Mets come to town.  In fact, the Marlins drew over 35,000 fans each game and had some of their largest crowds of the year.  It wasn’t so hard for people to come out to the ballpark when Mark Texeira and Derek Jeter came to town.

Face it, the fans in South Florida have allegiances to teams other than the Marlins.  South Florida is a transcient area composed of mostly people from the Northeast and Midwest, retirees, and tourists.  The Marlins have tried every gimmick from giveaways, music, live entertainment such as the Mermaids and Manatees (Marlins' dance teams), and even free ticket giveaways.  They’ve even had rapper Pitbull and legendary artist Jimmy Buffett doing corny songs and renaming the venue to “Landshark Stadium,” after Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Brewing label known as Land Shark Lager.  The tickets are priced amongst the cheapest in baseball where a fan can get a season ticket for $79, and can get a single game ticket for as low as $5 and have your own section, I mean, seat.

And to add to the fan base issues, ownership has decided to change the name of the team to the “Miami” Marlins in 2012, and introduce a new logo along with different team jerseys.  Why would they want to further alienate the few fans that they have who live in Northern and Central Florida?  Ironically, the management decided to cover less territory and instead of representing the entire state of Florida, they will only represent the regional territory in the Miami metro area.  Doesn’t management want more people to watch the games and follow the team and cover as much territory as possible? I guess not.

These are the same fans in the Miami area who do not go to Dolphins, Panthers, and Heat games.  The Florida Panthers, South Florida’s NHL franchise, often cannot even find people who will take free tickets.  The Miami Heat, who won the NBA Championship in 2006, had plenty of empty seats when Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O’Neal were dominating their competition.  Even though they won their division last year in the NFL, the Miami Dolphins have lost more than 10,000 season ticket holders the past few seasons and have struggled to sellout games at home.

In South Florida, there is so much entertainment that attending professional sports games takes a backseat.  Looking at all the major sports franchises in the Miami area, attendance has shown a downward trend the past few years.  Most people would rather go to South Beach or spend their evenings partying at extravagant nightclubs than to catch a live game.  If Dwyane Wade and Shaquille O’Neal, “Flash” and “Superman” at their best, cannot fill the seats, how in the world do they think Josh Johnson and Hanley Ramirez are going to magically get these people to go to the games?