What bothered me about the Sports Illustrated story on the Marlins last week was not the fact that they put it on the cover. (The jinx, I'm sure, has an expiration date.) Or that they chose two newbies to represent the team (manager Ozzie Guillen and shortstop Jose Reyes). Even the new uniforms are starting to grow on me (except for that ridiculously over-sized, simpleton M on the caps).
What bothered me was the line in the story that said that the roof of the new stadium would remain open for only 10 games. I had heard that the roof would be closed a good deal, but fewer than a dozen games during which you can see the sky, breathe fresh air, watch baseball the way it's supposed to be watched is outrageous.
My least pleasurable baseball experiences have been watching teams that play (or played) in indoor stadiums: the Mariners, the Blue Jays, the Rays. I don't even like watching indoor games on TV. There seems to be something artificial, illegitimate about the whole affair.
Isn't the superiority of outdoor sporting events obvious? The most popular hockey event of the season - outside of the playoffs - is the game they play in a wintry baseball stadium. (Which Sports Illustrated always runs a stunning photograph of.) In Minnesota the Twins ditched their sad, prophylactic dome and built a new ballpark open to the northern sky.
A retractable roof for a summer sports team in the subtropics makes perfect sense. It's just that I thought it was to protect the field from the occasional shower, not to keep coddled millionaires from working up a sweat. Isn't the whole point of a retractable roof its ability to open and close, not close for five months? We thought we were getting a state-of-the-art stadium when in fact it's a throwback to the old days when businesses in South Florida would close their doors for the summer.
Management claims that the possibility of getting wet, and having to wait through rain delays, kept fans from coming to games in the past. Now we'll see if the impossibility of watching baseball in the great outdoors does the same.
