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Since 2007, the Marlins have held their free Super Saturday concerts after Saturday-night home matchups in a ploy to get people to attend games even if not for the baseball. The concerts sometimes snare an extra 10,000 fans, and KC and the Sunshine Band were last season’s biggest draw, so the corporate-disco outfit returned this year for the Fourth of July postgame show.
If you’ve ever experienced unexplained suicide pangs while watching a Miller Lite commercial, you’re familiar with the catalogue: “That’s the Way I Like It,” “Shake Your Booty,” “Get Down Tonight.” But after seeing the performance of Miami native “KC”, AKA Harry Wayne Casey, Saturday after the Fish played the Pittsburgh Pirates, we think he might be best advised to let the bar mitzvah compilation royalties roll in and give touring a permanent rest. Even in the upper deck, we’re pretty sure we could smell his heart sweating.
There’s no nice way to say it. As an Austin TV reporter delicately put it recently: “KC has not aged well. He’s bald and fat and sweats a lot.”
Indeed, besides the Barry Bonds-esque cross earring, he’s a dead ringer for Rush Limbaugh — or he’d make a nice body double for Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. He had trouble staying on pitch or even staying on his feet, nearly taking a dive during a disco spin. The guy handing him towels to dry his perspiration was working harder than Emilio Bonifacio legging out a triple in the seventh inning.
But what matters is that KC stayed alive and collected his check, goddamnit — and therein lies a metaphor for the Marlins this season. The Fish edged out the lowly Pirates, 5-3, and beat them again Sunday to take two out of three in the weekend series. They are now three games over .500, which is good enough for one game back in the severely underperforming National League East, and are now in San Fransisco to face one of the most anemic offenses in the league. If the Marlins can just keep lumbering through their rote dance steps and not slip on their own sweat — and the Phillies and injury-plagued Mets can continue to sputter — the Marlins could stumble right into the playoffs this year.
