...and Gord Ash as Sancho Panza

[sbrylski]

They have bowling at MP.

[TooLiveBrew]

Hasn't MP hosted at least one basketball game?

[Thurston Fluff]

back-up catchers- i'll have to dig some more to find out about the sale of the marlins and how it related to attendance. I recall hyzinga demanded a new stadium and the Florida voters voted it down. I'm not sure long he had the team up for sale. i thought, unlike the brewers that it was a very quick sale. I als o not certain if hyzinager was the guy who traded off their veterans to make the team ready for a sale, or if the new owner did as part of a house cleaning.

 

Loria bought them in 02 after he sold the Expos to the other 29 teams. Hyzinga tried to buy a good team in an effort to get a new stadium built. When it didn't happen he gutted the team. At the time everyone was up in arms over the fact that the onwer gutted the team without giving it so much as a chance of defneidng it's title.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Loria

For a further comparison of how badly it hurts the team, attnedance wise, to operate the way the Marlins do I'll add two other attendance figures that have some sort of similarity to the Marlins situation.

 

The AZ Diamonbacks won the WS in 01. They are similar in that it's a city of transplants and a young team with very little history. It was also a team that primarily bought the title buy getting Johnson and Shilling along wiht other veterans like Counsell ect. The year they won the WS they had an attendance fiure of 2,735,821. The following year they got a boost to 3,200,725.

 

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/teams/dbacks3.shtml

The Chicago White Sox are similar in that they both have owners that are not very popular with their fans and a white elephant of a stadium in a bad neighborhood with little chance of that changing anytime soon. Their attendance in their WS year of 05 was 2,342,834. They got a boost the following year to 2,957,414.

 

http://baseball-almanac.com/teams/wsoxatte.shtml

I couldn't find one single team that have had the success of the Marlins without some sort of concurring attendance boost after winning it all. It's simply unheard of outside of them from what I can see. If you look at it objectively there has to be a reason for that. I find very little evidence to suggest it is anything but the model they use to build their teams. It may be great for them to win a wildcard every five years or so and got them two World Series rings but it came at the expense of building or, at the very least, maintaining their fan base.