Despite the struggle to attract fans to watch the Marlins, Miami baseball lovers are having a blast watching the Caribbean Series.
Despite the struggle to attract fans to watch the Marlins, Miami baseball lovers are having a blast watching the Caribbean Series.
Miami — The stadium is in a neighborhood with property owners selling parking spots in their driveways and yards, similar to Lambeau Field. Unlike in Green Bay, it’s 70 degrees in February, you can buy arepas from sellers on the sidewalk, and everybody is speaking Spanish.
The Miami Marlins’ stadium, located in Little Havana, is bustling almost two months before Opening Day because it is hosting the Caribbean Series this year. It’s the first time the series has ever been played in an MLB stadium, and only the third time it has been played in the mainland U.S. (the previous two were also in Miami; it has been played in Puerto Rico many times).
The Marlins in recent years are known for their dismal attendance: second-worst in MLB in 2023 at just over 14,000 spectators per game. But their stadium was packed with 32,000 screaming fans for the Puerto Rico vs. Venezuela game on Sunday.
Many other countries in this hemisphere have professional baseball leagues that play in the winter, during the MLB offseason. Most of them wrap up in January, and the league champions trade in their team jerseys for national jerseys and advance to the Caribbean Series in February. The Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico are mainstays in the tournament. Other countries come and go. This year, Panama, Nicaragua, and Curaçao make up the rest of the field.
The tournament was first held in 1949 in Havana. Cuba could no longer compete when Fidel Castro banned professional baseball in 1961, and the series went into abeyance. It restarted, without Cuba, in 1970 and has been held every year but one since then.
Each team plays each other team, then the top four advance to the semifinals. Sunday’s game was in the round-robin portion of the tournament. Venezuela is managed by former White Sox and Marlins manager Ozzie Guillén, and former Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina manages Puerto Rico. Venezuela was assigned to be the home team, and the crowd was more on Venezuela’s side, though Puerto Rico’s contingent was also strong.
The public-address announcements and fan activities during inning breaks were exclusively in Spanish. The umpires were all from participating countries. As is common in the winter leagues, the players’ and umpires’ uniforms were covered in advertising. The 50/50 raffle raised funds for the Pedro Martinez Foundation, which also sponsored the souvenir soda cups. Concession stands served hot dogs and chicken tenders, but also Cuban sandwiches with plantain chips. El Cubano Gigante was also available for purchase, measuring about three feet long.
The crowd showed up on Miami time, and the stadium wasn’t full until the second inning, which is a shame because Puerto Rico played well in the first. In the top of the inning, they strung together base hits and moved station to station to score two runs. In the bottom, first baseman J. C. Escarra recovered a poor throw from the shortstop, got the batter-runner in a pickle between first and second, and threw out a runner trying to advance to home.
MLB fans skew older, but the crowd at Sunday’s game showcased a range of ages. It wasn’t hard to find families with three generations present. Lots of kids were there having a blast. They especially liked waving the Puerto Rican and Venezuelan flags, of which there were many, or wearing them as capes. The game lasted over three hours, and no pitch-clock violations were called.
Many fans had national jerseys, and there were almost no MLB jerseys. There were many Roberto Clemente jerseys, even on people who were certainly too young to have any memory of his playing career. Clemente, the first Latin-American Hall-of-Famer, played for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972, amassing exactly 3,000 hits before dying in a plane crash on his way to help with relief efforts for an earthquake in Nicaragua. The Puerto Rican professional league is named after him, and he remains a hero among Latinos for his extraordinary playing skill and humanitarian efforts.
This crowd watched baseball differently than an MLB crowd. At an MLB game, most people partly pay attention while having conversations with the people around them and plotting concession-stand runs to get more food and beer. At Sunday’s game, spectators were locked in to the action on the field, and their baseball IQ was high.
After Puerto Rico put up two runs in the first and one more in the top of the second, Venezuela had men on first and second with one out in the bottom of the second. As the batter, former MLB infielder Alcides Escobar, got deeper in the count, the crowd grew louder until, by the time Escobar reached a full count, everyone was on their feet. The place went berserk when Escobar dropped a single to right field, but Puerto Rico right fielder Nelson Velazquez gunned down the runner trying to advance from second to home. The next batter popped out, ending the inning.
An MLB crowd would be unlikely to be that energized in the second inning, but these fans understood that this was a major scoring opportunity that might not come around again. Unfortunately for Venezuela fans, it ended up setting the stage for what Venezuela would do for the rest of the game: Put runners in scoring position and fail to bring them home.
Puerto Rico pulled off Houdini acts several times. They escaped from that situation in the second without allowing any runs. Venezuela had men on second and third with no outs in the third inning. They got there from a walk and a double. Learning from the last inning, every Venezuela fan sitting around me put up their hands to give the runner rounding third the stop sign, so he wouldn’t get thrown out at home. But Puerto Rico got two strikeouts and a groundout to end the inning without allowing any runs. In the fourth, Venezuela had bases loaded with no outs, and only managed a sacrifice fly for one run. In the seventh, Venezuela had men on first and second with no outs and only scored once.
The final score was 6–2, and the box score would show Puerto Rico was in command the whole game. But you’d never know that from the crowd. The Venezuela faithful were on the edge of their seats, beating drums and clanging cowbells, for each one of those scoring opportunities because they know a baseball game can turn on a dime if the team strings together a few hits.
Neither team was playing “three true outcomes” baseball. That refers to the main style of play at the MLB level, where many at-bats result in a walk, a strikeout, or a home run — the three outcomes that don’t involve the defense. The level of noise and energy from the crowd was all the more remarkable considering that neither team hit a home run. The eight runs scored in the game came from: 1) an RBI single, 2) an error, 3) an RBI groundout, 4) a sacrifice fly, 5) a sacrifice fly, 6) a fielder’s choice, 7) an RBI single, and 8) a strange double play in which the scoring runner touched home just before the third out was made on a tag play at second. This was not optimized, factory-style baseball.
It was fun.
Every baserunner was a reason to cheer. Most fans did not stand for the seventh-inning stretch or sing along with “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” but they sang nonstop during the other inning breaks to Latin pop songs, with the music continuing on a stage outside the stadium after the game. And everybody says “Ooo” after a big swing-and-a-miss in the same language.
Ads throughout the game encouraged ticket purchases for the Marlins’ Día Inaugural — 28 de Marzo, but good luck convincing these fans that regular-season Marlins baseball is anywhere near as fun as the Caribbean Series. I don’t even speak Spanish, and I’d rather watch Sunday’s game than the Marlins, or the Nationals, the team closest to where I live.
Puerto Rico and Venezuela are two of the best teams, and other games in the round-robin stage of the tournament were much less attended, but the semifinals and finals on February 8 and 9 will almost certainly be jam-packed. Miami was also home to the final games of the extremely successful World Baseball Classic last year, with an unforgettable USA vs. Japan matchup in the championship game. Despite the major MLB rule changes last year that were supposed to revive its viewership, 2023 regular-season TV ratings were basically the same as 2022, and the 2023 World Series had the lowest ratings on record.
Baseball is often portrayed as a peculiar American game, but that portrayal would bewilder millions of Latin Americans and East Asians. And if the international tournaments held in Miami the past two years are any indication, it seems like they’re having more fun with the game than MLB is at the moment.