Baseball

By Todd Heustess
For Outsports.com

Miami--It’s come down to this: I’m screaming, or at least trying to, but my voice is gone, and I wouldn’t be able to hear myself over the huge wall of noise surrounding me anyway. All 65,000+ people in this bright orange football stadium are standing, cheering, screaming, creating a deafening racket that probably fooled NASA into thinking that there was a shuttle launch set for this humid, cloudy, South Florida afternoon.

It’s the top of the ninth inning, and the Marlins (yes the Marlins) are clinging precariously to a 7-6 lead over the heavily favored San Francisco Giants. If they win today they pull off a huge upset, winning the series 3-1 and moving on to the NLCS. If they lose, it’s off to Pac Bell Park for a series deciding Game 5, to be played just 24 hours later.

The Giants have already scored once here in the top of the ninth off Ugueth Urbina, the Marlins’ closer, slicing in half the two-run lead. There are two outs, and the Giants have men on first and second. Jeffrey Hammonds is up at bat; ready to drive in the tying run, if not a game-winning one. Despite the muggy conditions, I have goose-bumps up and down my arm and the stadium feels like its swaying to the noise, or maybe that’s just my nerves.

I have just moved back to South Florida, and have no rooting interest at all in these Marlins, but in 24 hours they have not only made me a Fish fan, but have rekindled my love of baseball. I thought the previous game (which ended about 18 hours before this one began) was a classic, a 4-3 come-from-behind, 11-inning, Marlin victory that had me hanging on every pitch. I had no idea that the game I would actually attend (I watched the 11-inning victory on TV) would create even more drama, more frayed nerves.

College football is my passion (Love those Cocks!) but since my alma Mata (USC-East) is known more (if at all) for its nickname rather than football prowess and I haven’t lived in South Carolina since graduation, I rarely get caught up in a passionate frenzy any more when I’m attending or watching a football game. Instead, it is baseball that has gotten me all hot and bothered in the last decade. I grew up in South Carolina and by geographical association was a Braves fan, but in the 1980’s the Braves were a pretty pitiful franchise, usually playing before hundreds of fans in the cavernous dump known as Atlanta-Fulton County stadium.

I moved to Atlanta after college in the summer of 1991, at the very beginning of the Braves’ improbable “worst-to-first” run that year. Atlanta became a baseball-mad city, with everyone consumed by pennant fever as the Braves went all the way to the World Series, before losing to the Twins in Game 7. My casual attitude about the Braves and towards baseball in general, was transformed almost overnight that fall of ‘91 as I began spending crazy amounts of money on tickets and hanging on every pitch, every little nuance of each game.

Until this game on this overcast and muggy day in October in South Florida, I had the Braves to thank for my two most memorable baseball experiences. I was in attendance at the NLCS Game 7 between Atlanta and Pittsburgh when Atlanta went into the bottom of the ninth, trailing 2-0 and many of the sellout crowd had starting leaving. Atlanta made an amazing, logic-defying comeback that night, winning 3-2 as Sid Breem, lumbered from second base and slid into home with the game-winning run sending the stadium into an orgasmic frenzy of delight. To this day, I’m positive I’ve never hugged so many people in such a short period of time in my life. I was also in attendance at the last game played in Fulton County Stadium, when the Braves lost a heartbreaking 1-0, 11-inning classic to the Yankees in Game 5 of the 1996 World Series. Since then the Braves have given new meaning to the term post-season failure as year in and year out they run through the regular season only to collapse in the playoffs. The cumulative effect of all these playoff failures made me somewhat numb to baseball, though I did revive slightly during the thrilling 2001 Series between the Yankees and Diamondbacks. I never stopped going to games, but I went to Cubs, Dodgers, and Angels games when I lived in Chicago and L.A. more for the social atmosphere and entertainment value of the games and venues than for any real passion about the teams or the sport of baseball.

Until now, until this moment. Hammonds takes the pitch and whacks the ball, sending a fast-dropping single into left field that drops right in front of Marlins outfielder Jeff Conine. J.T. Snow has long since left second base and is charging home. I’m certain that the Giants are going to tie it up, prolonging this nerve-shattering game to extra innings, more drama. Is the stadium quiet or is it just my imagination? I’m still trying to scream, jumping up and down with my arms around somebody.

Somehow Conine picks the ball up on the first bounce and makes an incredible throw. Snow is charging into home and Marlins catcher Ivan Rodriguez, is setting himself up, blocking the plate. The ball arrives in Pudge’s glove, and Snow sprawls across home plate, knocking Pudge on his back. That one second hangs like an eternity, and just when I think I’m on the verge of a stroke, I see the home plate umpire signal “Out!” The next 10 minutes are pure ecstasy, as the stadium rocks with pure white noise, the unbridled joy of 65,000 fans rising up and washing over me, a wave a pure adrenaline.

It’s moments like these, games like these, that can make the non-baseball fan a fan for life, I think to myself. It is not overstating it at all to say that these two pulse-pounding, one-run victories by the Marlins may have saved baseball in South Florida.

This is the same stadium where a couple of years ago, the new owner introduced himself to every fan attending the game that day and asked them to move to the $100 seats. South Florida’s fans get knocked a lot for being unsupportive, fair-weather fans, and while there is some truth to it, it really is not a fair assessment to make. Many of the fans I talked to yesterday, were attending their first games since the 1997 World Series, having finally allowed themselves to trust the team and the owners again. When Florida won the ’97 World Series, then-owner Wayne Huizenga tore apart the nucleus of the team, selling off and trading away the leading players and the Marlins went from being World Champion in ’97 to being a 100-loss laughingstock in ’98 and it effectively destroyed the fan support and community goodwill afforded the team after the Series. The Marlins were even rumored to be one of the teams that baseball might eliminate if the league pursued its contraction strategy.

These same fans were still recapping the game, tailgating with old and new friends over an hour after the game had ended. I realized as I sat there, drinking a beer with some new friends, taking in the smell of Cuban sandwiches and chorizos grilling around me, listening to animated conversations in English and Spanish (it is Miami after all), that I wasn’t the only one who rediscovered baseball. A city and area that is usually has a blasé attitudes towards sports (Dolphin games being a major exception) and has few unifying threads, had rediscovered its passion for baseball thanks to a bunch of over-achieving underdogs who don’t know when to quit. As I pondered this, I took another sip of beer and thought to myself, “Saludos Marlins y Saludos Miami!” Now, what’s the number to Ticketmaster?

Oct. 6, 2003