Remember when the Marlins announced the roster of local artists they'd hired to spruce up their new Little Havana ballpark and everyone was all, "Yay! No Britto! Nice work, team." That enthusiasm was tempered as we got our first look at the iris-searing home run sculpture in left, a construction so bright and packed with waving flamingos that players wondered if it might cause lefty hitters to suffer seizures at bat.
Now that we've seen the first video of the thing in action, it's time to admit the unthinkable: Miami would have been better off letting Britto's army of factory artists decorate the stadium.
Sometime between when that giant Marlin rises out from behind the neon lights and the side of the statue starts vomiting water like a surfacing whale shark this thing just goes completely off the rails.
Granted, it's weird watching the sculpture at work in a completely silent stadium. Maybe, when a few thousand cheers at Mike Giancarlo Stanton's latest homer are echoing around the park, those flapping flamingos will seem like a legit piece of a baseball park.
But the best home run celebrations are funny and cheesy without, you know, embarrassing the entire city they represent: Bernie Brewer sliding down his waterslide; the Mets apple that bobs above the outfield wall; even those dumb trains on that circle the outfield walls in Houston are kind of charming.
The worst part of the Marlins sculpture is that all year long you can expect the kind of quotes that catcher Jon Buck recently gave USA Today: "It's big and bright," Buck said, "just like Miami."
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