Tired of the Marlins? Come see the Manatees

Hey, baseball fans, rooting for a bad team?

Is constantly watching your team lose getting… Hey, baseball fans, rooting for a bad team?

Is constantly watching your team lose getting you down?

Do you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and desperately popping in old Tom Emanski VHS tapes to see how the game of baseball is played the right way?

Well, fret no more. The Florida Marlins have a way to bring you back to the ballpark.

Last Sunday, the Marlins held tryouts for what the franchise is calling the Marlin Manatees.

What sounds like just a hilarious name for a new mascot is something much bigger. And yes, that’s a pun.

According to the Marlins website, they held a casting call for “South Florida’s BIGGEST Marlins Fans.”

The description of the position: “The Florida Marlins are looking for big bellies with the biggest jiggle, big feet with the best dance moves and enthusiasm that will rock Marlins fans out of their seats.”

Can you believe it? Finally, a job for those who might be overweight but light on their feet. A chance to be a part of Major League Baseball’s first all-male performance team and free tickets to see the Marlins. Call me crazy, but that sounds like a winning combination if I’ve ever heard one.

“The Marlins Manatees will perform at Friday and Saturday Marlins home games throughout the 2008 season,” the website says. “Manatee hopefuls do not need prior dance experience – just the willingness to learn routines and have a great time dancing and cheering in front of thousands of fans.”

And I think we all know “thousands of fans” is a generous estimate of the number of fans but hundreds isn’t a bad start. Plus, how does only working on the weekends sound? About as delicious as the unwrapping of a hamburger and the proceeding squirts of a ketchup bottle.

But, like with most great things, there are catches.

“Manatee hopefuls should: arrive in Marlins attire, be 18 years or older, be prepared to learn a choreographed routine.”

It’s time to dust off and squeeze back into those Mike Piazza jerseys. But what kind of dances will be done once into said jersey?

Well, the Manatees couldn’t call themselves a group of large, dancing men if they didn’t at least try to copy the dance-off between Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze from the Chippendales “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

After that, one should probably expect lots of skimpy outfits mixed in with lots of gyrating motions, creating a ripple in many a midsection.

Really, all I hope is that the Marlin Manatees are constantly moving around and dancing. I’d be extremely disappointed if they were sprawled out in the outfield sunbathing like a pack of beached whales.

They need to run around, jump, dance, etc. Basically, anything that can increase the jiggle-factor is what’s going to win over the crowd.

And isn’t that what we all want when going to see baseball games? Large men shaking around on top of the dugouts. It’s just, ha ha, hilarious. See? I can’t stop laughing just thinking about it.

The Marlins have landed on a soft, flabby gold mine – preferably mustard gold, of course. They really are a model franchise.

What the Marlins have done is set up a successful formula, in which every few years the team will win the World Series and then ship out all the players that helped to win it for younger players over the next few seasons.

While rebuilding, they still need people to come see the team, so they devise genius marketing ploys such as this one.

But don’t forget about “Super Saturdays,” in which after Saturday games the fans are treated to a concert and fireworks. The first concert of the year features Poison front-man-reality TV extraordinaire Brett Michaels. Why even bother playing the games when you’ve got the Marlin Manatees, fireworks and Brett Michaels?

If anything, that silly game should be considered the free entertainment and people should be paying for everything else, you know, things that are actually entertaining.

But the baseball is something that people are going to have to suffer through in order to see the Marlin Manatees. They’ll most likely perform between innings, too. It’s not like with Brett Michaels or fireworks where you can show up right before the game ends and still see everything you actually wanted to.

So while there might actually be some applause this season at Marlin games, it most likely won’t be for Hanley Ramirez or the other 24 guys on the team. It will be for the big, bulging bellies of an all-male dance troupe.

And that’s the way baseball was meant to viewed, really.

It’s just a shame the Marlins traded Miguel Cabrera this offseason. The Manatees would’ve definitely made him look better by comparison.