FLORIDA MARLINS

The Florida Marlins may be a new franchise, but they already have a wild and wickedly successful post season record that would make many more established teams envious. The Marlins have been to the playoffs twice, both times as a wild card. They are a perfect 6-0 in post-season series and they have been involved in three of the most exciting and extraordinary plays in baseball post-season history.

There was little hint of the Marlins flair for post-season dramatics when they began play in 1993. The National League awarded the Florida franchise in 1991 to Wayne Huizenga, CEO of the movie rental giant Blockbuster. Huizenga already owned both the Miami Dolphins of the NFL and Florida Panthers of the NHL.

The Marlins opened play in 1993 with a 6-3 win over the Dodgers. The rest of the season was a good news / bad news scenario. The bad news was the team finished 64-98. The good news is they avoided the National League East cellar finishing five games ahead of the Mets.

The next few years did not go much better, but by the time Jim Leyland became manager in 1997, Huizenga's free agent money had added Bobby Bonilla (.297, 17 HR, 96 RBI), Gary Sheffield (.250, 21HR 71RBI), and Moises Alou (.292, 23 HR 115 RBI) to the offense and Kevin Brown (16-8), Livan Hernandez (9-3), Alex Fernandez (17-12) and Rob Nenn (35 saves) to the pitching staff, all of them handled by the league's best defensive catcher in Charles Johnson.

The Marlins won the wild card with a 92-70 record and then took out the Giants and the Braves in the N.L. Playoffs. They defeated Cleveland's Indians in the World Series, winning on the first of their extraordinary post-season plays. The seventh and deciding game went to an eleventh inning when Marlin shortstop Edgar Renteria whacked an RBI single just past the glove of Indian pitcher Charles Nagy to score Craig Counsell with the series-winning run.

Florida became the youngest franchise to win a World Championship (fifth season). They were also the first Wild Card team in Major League history to win it all.

Huizenga began peeling off the layers of his championship team almost as soon as Bud Selig handed him the World Series trophy. Claiming expenses were too high, Huizenga held a fire sale over the next year, selling most of his star players and leaving a devastated hulk of a team which plummeted to a 54-108 season. The Marlins became the first team to lose one-hundred games the season after winning the World Series.

Leyland resigned after the 1998 debacle, and Huzienga sold the team to businessman John Henry shortly thereafter. But the damage was done. The Florida fans felt betrayed by Huzienga's fire sale and they showed their anger by staying away from Marlins' games in droves. By 2002, the Marlins only averaged about ten thousand fans per game.

To their credit, the Marlins continued to cultivate or trade for young talent, such as Luis Castillo, Mike Lowell and Juan Pierre, plus pitchers Brad Penny and Josh Beckett. Adding free agent catcher Ivan Rodriguez was the final piece of the puzzle for the 2003 season.

Due to injuries, the team started poorly — so poor in fact they had baseball's worst record on May 11 (19-29). Things began to turn when the Marlins brought in seventy-two year old Jack McKeon to manage and brought up feisty pitching prospect Dontrelle Willis. Willis went 9-1 in his first thirteen starts, and as the pitching staff got progressively healthy, it got progressively stronger. A 91-71 mark earned them their second Wild Card berth.

Demonstrating that they had not lost their post-season magic, the Marlins defeated the Giants 3-1 in the best-of-five first round, ending the series with another of their signature extraordinary plays. The Marlins had a two-run lead going into the ninth inning of the fourth game. The Giants got one run back and were bidding to tie the game when Marlin outfielder Jeff Conine threw out J.T. Snow at the plate. It was the first time in baseball history that a post season series ended with a game's tying run being thrown out at the plate.

That play was only a sample of what was to come in the next series. Trailing the Cubs three games to two, and trailing 3-0 in Game Six, the Marlins became beneficiaries of the infamous (at least in Chicago) Bartman incident.

A lifelong Cub fan, Steve Bartman prevented Cubs outfielder Moises Alou from catching a foul ball near the stands which would have been the second out of the eighth inning. Inexplicably, the play changed the karma of the game and the Marlins rallied to score eight times before the Cubs got the third out. The Marlins won 8-3 and Game Seven the next night.

The Marlins capped the season with a six-game win over the Yankees in the World Series, behind the pitching of Beckett and Penny.

One thing you have to say about the Marlins and their brief history. They may have had up and down seasons, but when they make the post season, they have been flawless and they have been extraordinary.