Happy 30th birthday, Miami Marlins!
A former Marlins beat writer reflects on 14 years covering the ups and downs of a team that played its first game 30 years ago today on April 5, 1993.
That’s my friend Marty on the left and that’s me on the right. It’s April 5, 1993 — 30 years ago today — and we’re at the very first Florida Marlins game.
I share the photo not just to illustrate what a really bad ‘90s haircut looked like but to tell a little about myself and how I wound up launching this Palm Beach Stories newsletter.
When I attended that inaugural Marlins game (which they won, 6-3, against the Dodgers), I was four years into a 31-year career at The Palm Beach Post. I was covering Palm Beach County government in 1993 and I made sure to play hooky on the very first Major League Baseball opening day in South Florida, a ritual I enjoyed growing up in Pittsburgh.
I’d been a rabid baseball fan all my life, a passion nurtured by my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates, a team that marked my childhood with countless Opening Days in the outfield bleachers and two championships. (Winning teams, like the Roberto Clemente/Willie Stargell Pirates I was fortunate to grow up with, have been rare for more recent generations of Pirates fans.)
That photo was taken moments before my friend and I walked into Joe Robbie Stadium and took our seats in the left field corner and watched Charlie Hough deliver the first pitch.
I would attend many more Marlins games in the ensuing years, the vast majority from the press box.
In the summer of 1997, I left the news department and joined the sports staff, initially covering high school football. That October, I found myself in the middle of the champagne celebration in the Marlins clubhouse after they won the World Series.
I started covering the team full-time in 1999, a dream gig that included another World Series, two no-hitters (including Roy Halladay’s perfect) game), the Steve Bartman game at Wrigley Field and too many stories about star players traded to other teams.
Despite winning championships in 1997 and 2003, the Marlins were notorious for payroll-slashing fire sales that torched their fanbase. My best efforts to report and write about the ups and downs of a struggling team with stars like Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis and Jose Fernandez failed to attract the same loyal readers that made the Miami Dolphins, despite their chronic ups and downs, the sports section’s sacred cow.
The party ended in May 2013. Reallocating the newspaper’s dwindling resources to more essential uses, the Powers That Be trimmed Marlins coverage from the sports section and moved me back to the newsroom.
I was not at all happy with the move. I briefly considered quitting. But I’m glad I stuck around for what turned into another productive seven years, including a stint on a talented investigations team that exposed the wrongs of the addiction-recovery industry and the destruction wrought by the opioid epidemic.
Too old to stop my hair from turning gray but still too young to retire, I accepted a buyout in December 2020 and left The Post. A few months later, I launched my independent news website, ByJoeCapozzi.com.
And if you’ve read this far, you know I joined the Substack bandwagon with Palm Beach Stories. Joining the legions of self-promoters in the viral-aspiring social MEdia age, Palm Beach Stories offers a peek behind the scenes at ByJoeCapozzi.com, with a few extras allowing readers to get to know me a bit.
Now, back to that 30-year-old photo.
Regrettably it’s the only one I have from that day. I did bring a hand-held video recorder with me and I remember capturing scenes as we walked around the ballpark.
One day a few years ago I found the video cassette in a box in the garage but the tape was badly damaged; it crumbled and broke no matter how gently I tried to handle it. I took the remnants to a video restoration place but the cassette was declared dead on arrival.
But I still have a fading photo of two giddy baseball fans in the parking lot on Opening Day in 1993.
GREAT story Joe!