Photo by Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports
The Marlins are going to make things challenging for us all again, probably sooner than later. The team is good and young and moderately likable; when Jose Fernandez returns, they will be something like appointment viewing once every five days. This is great for them, and for the fans who have been locked in an extremely expensive sadomasochistic relationship, at a civic and cultural level, with the team's ownership more or less for as long as the team has existed.The man that owns the Marlins is named Jeffrey Loria, and he is a creep's creep—a podgy, unshameable hustler who has ripped off his community in every imaginable way with unflagging, unstinting vigor. He has done this through his meddling mal-stewardship of his team, but most notably and most expensively through the defective pastel stadium that he had the city's taxpayers build him, and which he uses as a hangar for his collection of large, terrible art and his baseball team. This fun baseball team, that we are eventually going to at least sort-of like, despite ourselves.The Marlins Home Run Feature should be another mark against Loria. The 86-foot tall sculpture, by the artist Red Grooms, cost taxpayers $2.5 million, and stirs unsettlingly to life after every Marlins home run. There are LEDs involved. There is water involved. Gigantic Marlins pinwheel through the air above a blazing pastel weirdscape of flamingos and palm trees and other utility-grade South Florida iconography. It is an extremely vivid two-story Tommy Bahama shirt in a noxious billionaire's climate-controlled pleasuredome; its cost breaks down to You Could Hire 500 Teachers, Or Have This Ridiculous Thing That Makes Noise After Jarrod Saltalamacchia Hits A Dinger. In its lurid, venal tastelessness, the Home Run Feature is basically Loria-ism writ large. It's a pure horror. And yet…And yet the Home Run Feature, like the Marlins themselves, is, in its blank and blinding and weirdly honest hideousness, kind of hard to dislike, even knowing where it came from and who it benefits. As we prepare for another season of cognitive dissonance—where this team and its towering sculptural representation are concerned, and elsewhere—we will need the help of every bit of our consciousness. In order to open your mind for this challenge, we have put the excellent Wooden Shjips song "Clouds Over Earthquakes" under a loop of the Home Run Feature in action. That video is above. Watch it. Go where it takes you. Your mind will not be the same when you are finished with this journey, but maybe it will be better equipped to handle the challenge that the Marlins represent. Let's go deeper.