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Baseball, Guns And Money — Where Else But Miami?
By Jay Busbee | May 11, 2007
We’re suckers for anything Miami. We buy every new Miami Vice DVD set the moment it hits, and we were among the handful who actually dug the movie version. We spent an ungodly awesome weekend there earlier this year. Heck, we even kinda like the Miami Heat. So when we read about a new documentary coming out on the demise of old Miami Stadium, well, you had us at…uh… “Miami.”
Here’s the deal: half a century ago, a wealthy Cuban land baron decided to build a baseball stadium in downtown Miami…a stadium that may or may not have been built with money stolen from a Cuban bank. For a brief time, the stadium was a hit, and it looked like baseball would take root in the south twenty years before the Atlanta Braves moved from Milwaukee.
However, the land baron died young, leaving the stadium to his son. Politics in Cuba being about as stable as a Vick family reunion, it didn’t take long before the son decided he had more pressing issues than baseball, like avoiding a Scarface-style chainsaw backrub. Throw in Castro revolutionaries, weapons smuggling, and those stolen millions, and you’ve got a story of a stadium that makes the fifty-year-old whining for the lost glory of Ebbets Field in Brooklyn seem like — well, like the whining it is.
Anyway, in the midst of the Cuban revolution — as documented in Godfather II — the baron’s son turned the stadium over to the city, which — in a move that will surprise no one south of Tampa — completely bungled and mismanaged the whole deal. A stadium which had once hosted everyone from Ted Williams and Jackie Robinson to Cal Ripken Jr. was converted into a refugee shelter, a flea market, and, in 2001, a pile of rubble.
White Elephant: What’s There To Save?, a documentary about the stadium, premieres this weekend in Miami. It’s the story of a guy who brought a baseball stadium to Miami but forgot to bring in the high-priced rent-a-free-agents to fill it. The (ugh) two-time World Champion Marlins — who are about due for another one of those binge sprees — learned the lesson well.
You’ll excuse us…Miami Ink is on, followed by CSI: Miami, and a repeat of that great Vice episode where Sonny really thinks he’s Burnett…
May 14th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Jay, still angry about Eric Gregg’s 15 ft strike zone in 2003? I know a Marlins fan that abhors the “they bought a title with free agents” line. His logic: don’t the Yankees and Red Sox try to do that every year?