Congratulations are in order for Fort Lauderdale native Mike Morse. He's playing in the big leagues! (I realize that the Washington Nationals lineup consists mostly of players who'd be in the minors for winning teams, but technically, it's a major-league baseball franchise.) Those opportunities have occurred only sporadically for the 27-year-old infielder, who last played against the Marlins in 2005, when he was a Seattle Mariner. Some 200 of Morse's friends and family attended the game at Land Shark Stadium, and they erupted Saturday when Morse played a starring role in the Nationals' victory over the Marlins. From the Washington Post:
Given that home plate umpire Tim Welke was often the loudest voice in the stadium, Morse's crack against the center field fence in the sixth, which broke a 2-2 tie, produced perhaps the top decibel point of the night.After the jump, the only chance you'll get this year to see the words "success" and "Land Shark Stadium" in the same sentence.
From the same Post article:
The present condition of Land Shark Stadium suppresses, with breathtaking success, the grand excitement of a mid-September playoff push. The stadium is equidistant from Miami and Fort Lauderdale, far enough from both that residents in neither area feel inclined to visit. At game time, a patch of black watercolor clouds pushed across the sky, threatening a deluge. As such, the Marlins' homer-happy lineup is a spectacle best viewed from the living room sofa.Come now. It rains in every American city with a baseball franchise. It's also hot as hell during the summer afternoons and evenings in those cities. But they still draw way more fans than the Marlins, where even the miserable attendance figures may be inflated:
An announced crowd of 15,247 -- maybe they counted the eyeballs instead of the heads...Wait. It's eyeballs, right? The number of eyes watching a game. If you're saying that it's heads now, woah! I'm no longer feeling confident about the financial prospects of that new Marlins stadium.
