The Florida Marlins Get an Offseason Facelift

Kelsey Doherty, Marketing Communications, 2014

As the World Series comes to a close, the Florida Marlins are not filling out line up cards but instead they are packing up their U-Hauls and heading to Miami. The Marlins have a new home, and with that they have brought on some major changes.

Marlins Ballpark will now be located directly in Miami, instead of in Miami Gardens, a suburb where they shared the Sun Life Stadium with the Miami Dolphins. The team has taken this new ballpark as an opportunity to create somewhat of a new identity for themselves. They are no longer the Florida Marlins, but instead to reflect their new geographical change, they are the Miami Marlins. It’s a risky thing to pick up and move your newly-named team, and it certainly is not cheap. In the case of the Marlins however, it might be just what they need.

Baseball is a tough business to say the least; there is a lot of money to be made, and a lot of money to be lost. During the 2011 season the Marlins averaged 19,000 in attendance for each home game, putting them in the bottom three teams for attendance.  Many would say this is a result of the performance of the Marlins. Year after year, they produce young talent but as quickly as the talent arrives it leaves. Marlins owners never pays the high price to keep the young talent once their initial contracts are up. This gives fans little hope of seeing a championship caliber team with veteran talent.

Some will claim that real fans are the ones that watch their team through thick and thin, but the truth is that winning games draws fans and money. The Marlins have only seen the postseason twice since becoming a team in 1993, and both times they went on to win the World Series. But, unfortunately for the Marlins, it’s not enough to make a run at a title only twice in almost 20 years. If the ownership is not dedicated to winning, the next best thing is to make your team’s image appealing, or at least this is the approach the Marlins have taken.

The Marlins have now taken on a sort of rebranding. A new logo and colors are in place, and essentially everything about the team is getting a facelift. The new abstract logo has been met with some criticism, but the Marlins weren’t exactly known for their fan base to begin with, so the risk in changing the overall concept of the team is fairly minimal. The new logo that had been “leaked” a couple months back also has not received the greatest of reviews. For bigger markets, such as the Phillies and the Yankees, this would most likely be met with greater backlash. But for the Marlins, there is really only opportunity to grow from their miniscule fan base.

The new stadium, however, is nothing to criticize. It’s state of the art, with a retractable roof, just 2 miles from downtown Miami, and built to hold 37,000 fans. The size and design make it seem like it will be a cozy stadium more suitable for baseball. A $2.5 million statue is currently under construction in center field seating area. This sculpture, which will come to life every time a homerun is hit by a Marlins batter, has been a very questionable expenditure. At the beginning of October a sketch of the statue was released on the internet and immediately it received poor feedback. 96% of voters in a poll considered the sculpture to be tacky. When it comes down to it though, the new Miami Marlins have little to lose.

Even the roster itself will see a change, as the Marlin’s hired former White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. This could be the first step in the right direction for the Miami Marlins, with a new manager with a reputation for being disciplined with his players and lays claim to his own World Series ring. Now fans will have a more intimate ballpark, with a considerably more convenient location, a team with a new name, new logo, and in general a new look.

But in the end is this enough of a difference if ownership still does not put the money forward to create a winning team?  This is a question that will have to be answered within the next couple seasons. Marlins owners made the decision to spend their money on a new ballpark and hiring a marketing agency to rebrand their team.  That same money could have been spent on talent and creating a winning ball club, but instead ownership has decided a different look is the way to the heart and wallet of the fans. For now baseball fans will just have to sit and wait to find out if a new ballpark and name is enough to bring a team to the post season.