Posted on Sat, Jul. 13, 2002

 

There's no crying in local baseball

 

This is where we throw our hands up in angry exasperation or turn our backs in icy disgust, right? This is where (all together now!) we give up on the Marlins, on baseball ever making it in South Florida. That about it?

 

It is, based on the panicked reaction I've heard and seen since Florida traded Cliff Floyd and Ryan Dempster on Thursday.

 

Fans and media bray while some Marlins speak darkly of betrayal -- as if tinkering with an underachieving .500 team is akin to messing with the smile on da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

 

The angst-meets-gloom would lead you to believe the Marlins gave away Barry Bonds and Curt Schilling and got, in return, malaria.

 

Let's not retrofit Floyd as a towering superstar; he was a nice player with 18 homers. Juan Encarnaci?n, younger, has 16, with about as many RBI.

 

Let's not make too much, either, of losing Dempster, who was 5-8. A staff with A.J. Burnett, Brad Penny and Josh Beckett remains enviable.

 

Yet the aftershock of the trades suggests this is finally it -- that famous Last Straw. And that all that's left now is to:

 

A. Organize a mass boycott of games (which might already be underway, based on attendance), or

 

B. Ball into a fetal position, weep softly and await contraction like doomed patients hungering for euthanasia.

 

Well, boo hoo, people.

 

Buck up!

 

What a ripe, abundant vineyard of whiners we are. I don't mean you personally. No. You happen to be my favorite reader. I mean the general consensus of complaint among Marlins fans or expatriots.

 

We spend so much energy hectoring about pernicious owners, rain delays and cryin'-shame trades that we barely have time any more to work up a decent ''No new stadium on MY tax dime!'' chant.

 

We'd be smart to see a bigger picture. We have had major-league ball a mere nine years, and already we are spoiled.

 

We had to wait a whole four years to celebrate a World Series championship. Now it has been five years since that '97 title, and we act as if getting quickly back to that level is a royal birthright.

 

The Marlins are decent now, yet attendance is an embarrassment that even Luis Castillo's 35-game hitting streak failed to solve. And still we look for blame everywhere but in the collective mirror.

 

We want to blame baseball itself because it dared go on strike.

 

We want to blame Wayne Huizenga for dismantling ''our'' champions even as we all but disown ''our'' subsequently less successful Marlins. We want to blame John Henry because he failed to snap his fingers and make a new stadium appear.

 

We want to blame the rain that makes a retractable roof needed even as we vow no public funds to help build it.

 

Now we want to blame new owner Jeffrey Loria and club prez David Samson for jettisoning Floyd's big contract, even as all of those ''crowds'' in the 5,000s lead to such fiscal imperatives.

 

Don't read this as any valentine to Loria or Samson. I'm not sure I'd believe those guys if they told me the ocean was wet, so I, too, doubt it when they claim this week does not signal Fire Sale II. Their truthfulness (or not) will be evident soon, with the trade deadline July 31.

 

Meantime, the sorry state of this franchise is bigger than Thursday's deals, or even any yet to come.

 

We are to blame for this, bottom line. We the people.

 

We delude ourselves, and crane for excuses, when we still harp on Huizenga, or cite the weather, or huff anew into our personal boycotts because Floyd is going-going-gone.

 

It isn't for any of those reasons that the Marlins are leaving us, fading by degrees.

 

It is because we as a community simply don't love the sport enough, or the idea of having it. We treat it like something that has to constantly win us over, not something to which our heart is freely given.

 

We are losing the Marlins because we look at them and see an owner, a trade and a dark cloud before we ever see just baseball, the game that raised us, the American beauty that somehow endures -- and always will -- despite having as many faults as the rest of us.

 

gcote@herald.com

This year is pretty much the opposite of last year. :thumbup

nuff said, bub