Pure magic.

MAGIC I TELL YOU!

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All of which brings me to another problem with the Feesh. You’ve got (pick one) either a grossly underperforming bunch of guys with untapped native talent, or a team that was never as good as advertised in the first place (my own explanation for what’s gone on), or a decent team that’s been badly hamstrung with injuries (plausible). You’ve got hardly any audience on any given night. You’ve got a primping little putz of a President, an impecunious pathological liar and artsy-fart as an owner, and an at best very competent GM who built his undeserved reputation as some kind of standout genius on the shoulders of his predecessor, Dave Dombrowski, whose prior drafts and trades gave Larry Beinfest the core of his 2003 World Champions.

As the Dombrowski era players have faded, been traded or retired, the Beinfest teams – admittedly gagged by Scrooge McLoria’s fiscal hamhandedness – have faltered year after year, finally imploding entirely this year. The team made no moves at the trade deadline when they were close to .500 and still had a statistical prayer of making a run at the wild card, preferring instead to stock the roster with sub-Mendoza veterans who were further past their primes than Buck Brown’s Granny in an attempt to catch lighting in trick bottles, or call up and send down like some sort of reciprocating engine various AAA lifers and unproven rookies. In the process, Beinfest’s reputation has proven more and more a wardrobe out of the naked emperor’s closet.

Now you have players sniping at each other, players sniping at management, and management responding like Chinese state security with punitive measures against players. Logan Morrison’s slump came at just the right time to be a convenient cover for the Chihuahua to order Tweeter’s incarceration in Jacksonville. It’s all a smokescreen to make a front office that has built this team with smoke, mirrors, a couple of terrible contracts (Buck, especially) and enough P/R spin so that even the resident bloggers of HBT opened the season predicting that the Feesh could make a run at the wild card. Our regular correspondents here will recall that I argued against that prediction when the season opened and insisted that this team wouldn’t contend. I just didn’t expect them to be this bad – though I suspect that the injury plague has had a lot to do with that.

Tweeter is just a scapegoat. And there’s some karmic blowback here too, I think: Scrooge McLoria really wanted this team to build some cachet going into next season at the increasingly weird looking Macondo Banana Massacre Field, a stadium built at least in part on Scrooge and the Chihuahua’s deliberate misrepresentation of the Feesh’s finances. The approval of this bizarre structure – it looks like nothing so much as one of the cyborg helmets from Transformers and is about as appropriate to Macondo as a fire ant mound – was one of the big reasons given in the exit polls by local voters who recalled the county mayor by something like an 80-20 margin a couple of months ago. And now the team is treating one of its core players like a rejected transplant organ. It all goes together, doesn’t it?

LoMo: .249 Avg .327 OBP .464 SLG .791 OPS
HRam: .243 Avg .333 OBP .379 SLG .712 OPS