This is going to be a fun baseball season. We are only a week in and we nearly had a perfect game. Only a single up the middle by Astros’ Marwin Gonzalez wrecked Yu Darvish’s bid for a perfect game on opening night.
There are going to be great stories like Darvish throughout the year. There are also going to be sad stories to follow.
Down in Miami, one of the saddest of all is playing out daily. The Marlins are not a major league franchise. At best they are Double-A talent from top to bottom. They have the second lowest payroll in the game. The home run sculpture in centerfield I refer to as “The Ant Hill,” cost $2.5 million to build. That would make it the 5th highest paid player on the 2013 roster. With the lack of offense this team is displaying, Big and Little Enos, the two idiots that own and run the team, could save even more money by unplugging the eye-sore entirely. It’s not like it is really going to be used.
Big Enos aka Jeffrey Loria, is running the Florida Marlins into the ground. I will not call them Miami until he is no longer the owner. Big Enos has a tremendous amount of experience destroying baseball franchises. He managed to take the Montreal Expos, a once proud and solid organization, and systematically turn off the players and the fans. Once he completed his task, he sold the ‘Spos to Major League Baseball and the league moved them to Washington to become the Nationals.
His reward for this? He was given the Florida Marlins. Yes, they won a World Series in 2003 and he will boast about that if you let him. I won’t because what he has done since is disgusting. Fire sale after fire sale, bad baseball move after bad baseball move. Lying to anyone that will listen so he could be given a publicly financed stadium where the Orange Bowl once stood. Loria’s $12 million initial investment in the Expos has been parlayed into his current team being worth in excess of $520 million. Not a bad deal, if you can get it!
So back to baseball. The Marlins have very little talent and even fewer fans. I have said on my radio show that I don’t believe they will draw 750,000 actual bodies inside Marlins Ballpark this year. That is an average of just over 9200 a game. I think that number will be high. I have also joked via Facebook and Twitter that the Marlins are looking for a new marketing director with experience drawing flies. This should be extended to the baseball side of their operation considering fly balls of any kind would be a welcomed part of their performance.
Naturally, I started thinking about the worst teams in baseball. The 1908 St. Louis Cardinals are a study in futility. They scored only 372 runs and were shut out 33 times, both records that stand today. Those Cards only won 43 games that year.
But the 1962 New York Mets are widely considered the worst baseball team in history. That expansion team won 40 games, a record no one wants to brag about.
So throughout the season, day by day, I will be comparing the ’62 Mets record against the ’13 Marlins to see who will truly be…the worst team in MLB history? I will post this information on the SILVERMAN: On Sports Facebook page as well as on Twitter: @SilvermanShow. Follow SILVERMAN: On Sports all season long to find out the answer!
As of today:
1962 Mets: 0-8
2013 Marlins: 1-7
I want to take this opportunity to wish Big Enos the best of luck this year! He is already the worst owner in the history of professional sports, but he has chance to own the worst baseball team in history as well.
Actually the more I think about it, he doesn’t need luck to achieve this, he just needs to be himself!
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