David Adams at Pro Player Stadium with his then-infant son, Mikey, after Game 6 of the 1997 World Series.
It feels like only yesterday.
Lest I forget that championship season, a photo from the 1997 World Series has adorned the office wall above my desk since. The photo, taken under floodlights in the stands, shows my wife, Ines, with a baseball mitt wrapped around our 10-month-old son, who is dressed in a Marlins uniform.
My son, Mikey, had attended his first baseball game earlier that season. Taking him out to the ballpark and slotting him, in his car seat, into a cheap upper-deck seat - they were $1 in those days - was a good way to give my wife the night off, I discovered. He would enjoy the lights and the crowd noise for a few innings before nodding off for the rest of the game.
Now that the Marlins are back in the World Series, I would like to be able to say that my office wall will soon carry another similar photo. But these days, my wife can barely hold our 6-year-old son in her arms. Then there's the question of tickets.
I raced to Pro Player Stadium immediately after last Wednesday night's game in which the Marlins clinched the National League title. But after waiting for two hours in a line of thousands of like-minded fans, I went home ticketless. Thursday morning, I battled in vain on the Internet and over the phone to purchase tickets. By the time I finally got through, the games were sold out. When the World Series comes to Miami tonight, I'll be watching on TV.
That's okay. Of course I'd love to be there, but this year I don't feel quite the same compelling urge to witness it firsthand as I did in 1997. Maybe it's because I have a close group of friends with whom I watch the TV broadcasts.
Besides, the Marlins don't actually need my support anymore. Like my son, the Marlins have come a long way from 1997. Six years on, and only 10 years after they played their first game, the Marlins have finally come of age.
In 1997, my friends and I were astonished to stroll up to the stadium unimpeded during the playoffs to buy our tickets. None of the five home games during the first two playoff rounds was sold out.
In fact, Game 3 in the first round in 1997 against the San Francisco Giants attracted only 41,283 fans. Compare that with a capacity crowd of 65,464 this year for Game 4, an increase of almost 60 percent.
In 1997, Miami was new to baseball success. I was too. I became a fan, to my enormous surprise, in 1987 while working as a freelance journalist in Honduras. I'm a Brit, brought up on rugby and cricket.
In those days the CIA was snooping around Honduras, quietly pulling the strings of the U.S-backed Contra war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime.
We would hang out for long hours at the Totem bar in Tegucigalpa, hoping to eavesdrop on loose-tongued spies. At the bar, there was always beer, popcorn and baseball. I'm not sure we learned any great secrets, but my colleague Wilson Ring, an avid Boston Red Sox fan, unlocked the mysteries of baseball for me.
At the time, I had no idea that I would end up working for a U.S. newspaper and living in Miami. When I moved here in 1992, the Marlins didn't exist. But a year later, I watched knuckleballer Charlie Hough throw the first pitch of their first season.
I was hooked. They weren't much of a team, except for a young Gary Sheffield and catcher Benito Santiago. Jeff Conine, "Mr. Marlin," as he later became known, also was on the team. Conine went 4-for-4 that day. "We are going to give teams a lot of hell," he prophesied afterward.
Okay, so not that year. But the fans wouldn't have to wait long. By the time 1997 came around, I was fully primed to enjoy the game to its fullest. So much so that one American friend, Los Angeles Times correspondent Mark Fineman, credited me with reintroducing him to the game after 15 years abroad. In a reference letter penned to support my application for permanent residency, he described me as "the most dedicated baseball fan I have ever met without a U.S. birth certificate."
Conine was sadly let go in the now famous dismantling of the World Series champions. But now he's back, and so are the Marlins.
No one was more heartbroken than I over the breakup of the team. Owner Wayne Huizenga, of Blockbuster fame, deserved to go before a firing squad, I remember thinking. What right had he to shatter our dreams?
Like many fans, I stopped going to games for a while. But I couldn't resist coming back. Destiny, so much a part of baseball lore, seemed to beckon. When I rented a new apartment, the outgoing tenant was none other than Marlins third baseman Mike Lowell, out of the lineup at the time and battling testicular cancer. He has recovered and is back with the team.
The team played entertaining baseball with flashes of brilliance. But the crowds went away. Attendance dropped to only 813,000 in the 2002 season, down from more than 3-million in 1993.
Things didn't look good in the off-season. Two popular players, Kevin Millar and Cliff Floyd, were traded. The franchise was short-listed for contraction. Catcher Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez, whom many considered past his prime, was hired for $10-million in a much-questioned move to revitalize the team with a total payroll of only $50-million.
But how wrong everyone was. Under new ownership, then new management, a new team emerged. For all the fun the '97 Marlins gave us, this year's run has been more exciting. The team has come from behind in no fewer than six of its postseason victories.
For me there have been unexpected highlights. By coincidence, I was in Chicago during the Cubs-Marlins series and bumped into Lowell in the hotel bar. Fortunately, I had my lucky charm 1997 Marlins baseball hat in my room. After I raced upstairs he kindly autographed it for me.
So much is different this year, starting with the price of admission: an upper-deck seat that cost me $30 in 1997 goes for $60 today. In 1997 the Marlins were unfairly dismissed as a loose association of mercenaries. Now up against the mighty New York Yankees, the underdog Marlins are the darlings of baseball.
For Miami, the 1997 World Series was more political, and less about baseball itself. There was Livan Hernandez, the Cuban defector who was named Most Valuable Player in the World Series, poking a finger in the eye of Fidel Castro with his famous four-word post-game speech: "I love you Miami." For many Miami Cubans, victory was almost overshadowed by the negotiations to allow Hernandez's mother to fly out of Cuba in time for Game 7.
These days my son rarely attends games. Like any 6-year-old he has too many other things to entertain him, not to mention getting to bed early for school.
Some of my friends from 1997 still accompany me to the ballpark. New friends have joined us too, learning to relish the game as I once did.
Others have moved on. Sadly, my friend Mark Fineman died earlier this month in Baghdad after suffering a heart attack. I wish he could have been with us when we won the pennant on Wednesday, and I hope he's watching from the upper deck.
