I want to take you on a journey back to July 9 in Major League Baseball.
The Miami Marlins are ten games above .500 and are unequivocally the hottest team in baseball.
Their pitching looks dominant, they are getting timely hits with great baserunning, and their version of home cooking at loanDepot Park is setting all sorts of team records.
It seems like nothing can slow down this freight train from South Florida.
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Since then, though, the Marlins have lost 10 straight games and are falling further and further out of the playoff race as the calendar shifts to August.
Who on Earth could have seen this coming?
Well, me, for one.
I tried to warn folks, both at the beginning of the season when the Fightin’ Fish were one of the best teams to start the year, and right after their historic June where they seemingly put the rest of the league on notice.
What was once a strength of the team, its bullpen, is now blowing games in stupendous fashion, and that timely hitting and high-powered offense seems to have run dry at a time when most true contenders start playing their best baseball.
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And I, along with many other hardened Marlins fans, saw this coming a mile away.
It’s nothing new in Little Havanna, as anyone who has been a fan from the beginning can attest to.
We’ve had to endure fire sales, epic collapses, freak injuries to MVP-candidates, and even the death of a bright, young franchise cornerstone.
Nothing can truly faze a Marlins fan at this point, so when folks outside of the confines of Dade County started singing the praises of the hometown team, true supporters could only roll their eyes and wait for the other shoe to drop.
And drop it did!
If you want to know the precise moment the universal karma flipped out of favor for Miami, it’s probably when the aforementioned McCullough pulled star picther Eury Perez in the middle of a perfect game bid.
Perez had the ball taken from him after seven innings and only 92 pitches, which incensed fans both in Miami and beyond.
Sure, the Marlins would end up winning the game and their losing streak didn’t start for another four days, but this is when the baseball gods decided the Marlins would have to pay for their transgressions.
The good news? The Marlins are still only three games back of a Wild Card spot, and with the trade deadline looming, there’s still plenty of time to right the ship and make some moves to morph back into a contender.
But, as any cynical Marlins fan will tell you, it would be a pointless endeavor; a prolonging of the inevitable.
Rooting for this team is a Sisyphean effort.
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You can get excited about hot starts and record-setting Junes all you want, but the end result is always the same.
Just rip the Band-Aid off and start getting excited about football season, because I’m personally predicting another October with the lights off at loanDepot Park.
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