Remembering Marlins' 1997 World Series championship
MIAMI — The coronation occurred a quarter of a century ago, Oct. 26, 1997, at the stroke of midnight.
At that exact minute, Edgar Renteria's soft line-drive single to center scored Craig Counsell from third, catapulting the Florida Marlins to a 3-2 victory in 11 innings over the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) in Game 7 of the World Series.
Then a relatively infant franchise famous for their colorful teal-trimmed uniforms, the baby Marlins had done the improbable. They reached Major League Baseball's mountaintop in just their fifth season.
On a team filled with established veterans, it was a couple of the younger players who were involved in the snapshot-clinching moment. Renteria, then 20, delivered the biggest hit in franchise history, his hit off Charles Nagy. Counsell, then 26, arms flailing, leapt across home plate, setting off a South Florida celebration.
The radio call by Joe Angel was as classic as the seventh game itself: “A 5-year-old child has become king!”
This weekend, the now-Miami Marlins are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the franchise’s first World Series title during their series with the Milwaukee Brewers.
“You always want to relive that stuff,” said Counsell, now 51, and the Brewers manager. “That stuff is your favorite stuff in baseball to relive. It was an extra-inning game in the seventh game of the World Series. It was Game 7. The home team. To be the guy who got to score that run. Pinch yourself. It was a dream come true."
"The most amazing thing about that season," then-Marlins manager Jim Leyland said. "Just to have the honor to play in the World Series, we had to beat [Greg] Maddux twice, [Tom] Glavine and [John] Smoltz. Just to get there. When you think about that, that's three guys that just went into the Hall of Fame.
"That's why I don't think this World Series didn't get the credit that it deserved. I truly believe in my heart, had that World Series ended the same what that it did, against the Yankees or the Dodgers, it might have gone down as the greatest seventh game in the history of the World Series."
The franchise rebranded as the Miami Marlins in 2012, the year they relocated into loanDepot park in the Little Havana section of Miami. This weekend against the Brewers, they displayed the old Florida Marlins logo, and turned an auxiliary scoreboard into a replica of the old "Teal Tower" scoreboard in Hard Rock Stadium, the Marlins' original home.
Born in 1992, the Marlins' franchise grew up in a hurry. By 1997, they were not a fluke.
The Marlins finished 92-70, clinching the National League playoffs. The 92 wins remain a franchise single-season high. The 2003 World Series team finished 91-71. And the only other time the Marlins reached the playoffs was in 2020. In that 60-game shortened pandemic year, the Marlins went 31-29, and advanced to the National League Division Series.
“It wasn’t hard to see that it was a very good team,” Counsell said. “It was a team of big personalities. A very veteran team, for the most part. My job was to just go and play. That’s what I tried to do.”
Even as a young franchise, the 1997 Marlins were built to contend. Their payroll was seventh-highest in the majors at $47,753,000. The Indians were fourth-highest at $54,130,232, and the New York Yankees topped the majors at $59,148,877.
The Marlins signed free agent Bobby Bonilla, and they had a balance of such proven regulars as Gary Sheffield, Moises Alou, Jeff Conine, Charles Johnson, and a pitching staff that included Kevin Brown, Al Leiter and Alex Fernandez. And they had youth, with Renteria, Counsell and Livan Hernandez, the World Series MVP.
In the postseason, when the Marlins dispatched the San Francisco Giants in three games in the NLDS, they became the third franchise in MLB history to sweep its first-ever playoff series. The most recent team to have done that was the 1969 New York Mets, who eliminated the Atlanta Braves seven years after their inception.
Following its Division Series sweep, though, the NLCS proved more difficult for Florida. The series against Atlanta was knotted at two games apiece until the Marlins broke things open to win the final two contests. In the World Series, the Marlins were matched up against a loaded Indians squad that hadn't won a title since 1948. Both teams had their chances in the back-and-forth affair, which culminated in the Game 7 showdown in Miami.
“It was a fun team to break in with,” Counsell said. “It’s challenging. If you want to be on a good team, it’s not easy. I tell our players, if you want to be on great teams, it’s not easy. It’s hard. There are sacrifices. You don’t get everything you want. But it’s fun. That’s what you play for.”
Jim Leyland, who has a Hall of Fame-worthy resume, pushed all the right buttons managing the '97 team.
"I think his best trait is he just had an innate feel for people, the game," Counsell said. "A great sense of timing. That's what made him great."
"I think what made that team special is when Jim Leyland was signed, to give the organization some direction," Sheffield, the '97 Marlins' right fielder, said. "Leadership from the top. He brought that from Day One. Just the guys that we put together. To put together a lineup, myself and Conine, and to add to what we were trying to build. We put the right pieces together, and we got along. We had one heartbeat. That was the slogan throughout the World Series."
Today's MLB game relies heavily on analytics. Counsell notes that data alone can't describe the value a manager like Leyland had on the '97 team.
"You can't write a story about metrics and that," Counsell said. "It's a skill for managing people that he certainly had. That sense of timing. That sense of where individuals are at, to get the most out of them. It's something he was really good at."
As fast as the Marlins' rise to the top was in 1997, the decline came rapidly the following year. Without a baseball-only stadium, their late owner, H. Wayne Huizenga, dismantled the title team. The '98 team lost 108 games, and the organization has since gone through cycles of rebuilds and parting with popular players.
Fans are reminded of that in the weekend series with the Brewers, who feature former Marlins' standout Christian Yelich.
Early in the season, the Phillies visited Miami. Their president of baseball operations, Dave Dombrowski, built the 1997 team. Dombrowski knows all too well the ups and downs the Marlins and their fans have endured.
"Baseball has been tested down here," Dombrowski told The Post last month. "It started with what we did in ‘97. We broke up a world championship team that I think would have been a good club for years, if you would have built a foundation off of that. Then they won again, and they ended up breaking up that team. Fans need to have a consistency of knowing who they can cheer for and who is going to be with you."
What would have happened had the '97 team stayed together?
"We would have won a couple of more, and that's what I like to believe," Sheffield, who was traded to the Dodgers in May 1998, said. "We never got that opportunity. That stays with you forever. That's something a lot of us talk about. The ones who do stay in touch, we talk about this for a long time. We always wanted that opportunity to at least defend it."
"We were trying to build a dynasty. We had the nucleus to do it. We had a couple of guys who were getting older that we could have replaced. ... We never got the chance."
