Attendance or Batting Average?

Fish Stripes reports that Wednesday’s game between the Washington Nationals and Florida Marlins drew 375 people. Both teams are pulling up the rear of the National League East, so low attendance should come as no surprise, but triple digits?

Two aspects of this story fascinate me:

1. The announced attendance was 10,121, but a photo from the game tells a very different story. Er, forget steroids for a moment; someone is cheating here, and it ain’t the players.
2. The Marlins are a great case study in the difficulties of promoting a team that has no identity. This is a franchise that came into existence in 1993 and has won two World Series. If you’re keeping score at home, they’ve won rings in 13.3% of their seasons. The Boston Americans/Red Sox have done so in 5.6% of their seasons, the Dodgers (and their various predecessors) in 4.8%, the Cubs in 1.6%. Heck, the Cubs haven’t won the World Series since 85 years before the Marlins came into existence. (Even Miami’s original team, the Class D Florida State League Hustlers, didn’t appear until two decades after the Cubs’ last World Series victory.) Anyway, the point is that apparently winning isn’t enough to sustain a franchise. There needs to be at least some kind of tradition, and it’s hard to build one when you’re busy slashing payroll all the time and alienating your potential fan base.

[Tip o' the Knuckle Curve cap to Baseball Musings, whose suggestion of a move to Havana, Cuba, intrigues me...]