The Florida Marlins may be a new franchise, but they already have a wild and wickedly successful post season record that would make many more established teams envious. The Marlins have been to the playoffs twice, both times as a wild card. They are a perfect 6-0 in post-season series and they have been involved in three of the most exciting and extraordinary plays in baseball post-season history.
There was little hint of the Marlins flair for post-season dramatics when they began play in 1993. The National League awarded the Florida franchise in 1991 to Wayne Huizenga, CEO of the movie rental giant Blockbuster. Huizenga already owned both the Miami Dolphins of the NFL and Florida Panthers of the NHL.
The Marlins opened play in 1993 with a 6-3 win over the Dodgers. The rest of the season was a good news / bad news scenario. The bad news was the team finished 64-98. The good news is they avoided the National League East cellar finishing five games ahead of the Mets.
The next few years did not go much better, but by the time Jim Leyland became manager in 1997, Huizenga's free agent money had added Bobby Bonilla (.297, 17 HR, 96 RBI), Gary Sheffield (.250, 21HR 71RBI), and Moises Alou (.292, 23 HR 115 RBI) to the offense and Kevin Brown (16-8), Livan Hernandez (9-3), Alex Fernandez (17-12) and Rob Nenn (35 saves) to the pitching staff, all of them handled by the league's best defensive catcher in Charles Johnson.
The Marlins won the wild card with a 92-70 record and then took out the Giants and the Braves in the N.L. Playoffs. They defeated Cleveland's Indians in the World Series, winning on the first of their extraordinary post-season plays. The seventh and deciding game went to an eleventh inning when Marlin shortstop Edgar Renteria whacked an RBI single just past the glove of Indian pitcher Charles Nagy to score Craig Counsell with the series-winning run.
Florida became the youngest franchise to win a World Championship (fifth season). They were also the first Wild Card team in Major League history to win it all.
Huizenga began peeling off the layers of his championship team almost as soon as Bud Selig handed him the World Series trophy. Claiming expenses were too high, Huizenga held a fire sale over the next year, selling most of his star players and leaving a devastated hulk of a team which plummeted to a 54-108 season. The Marlins became the first team to lose one-hundred games the season after winning the World Series.
Florida Marlins History
