Some Affiliates are offering their Homes

by craig on Sep 14, 2007 8:58 AM EDT in News and Rumors

Almost every blogger and their dog, in the baseball blogosphere, wrote an article about the attendance for the Marlins last home game.

A couple of the dedicated bloggers from the team's Minor League affiliates went as far as to offer up their towns as a place that the Marlins would get a better in the park attendance figure.

It turns out I was only able to find the bookends.

First up: ABQrising makes the case for Albuquerque.

I don't pretend to know much about baseball as a business (except for right now), but I'd take a regular 7,000 fans over a fluctuating 1,000 to 16,000 fans. (Those attendance numbers for the Marlins are padded, too -- they count tickets sold; not people attending.)

Look, Albuquerque isn't exactly pint sized, and we aren't a 33 gallon barrel either, but I think we can hang with the likes of Kansas City, Cleveland, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, St. Louis, Tampa, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh -- all cities with MLB teams; all cities smaller than Albuquerque. Ok, depending on where you draw the lines their metro areas might be bigger, but with the exception of the Florida cities, all the others are seeing their populations drop. Albuquerque? We're rising, baby!

The short of it: let's bring the Marlins home to Albuquerque. It makes sense.

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Put the Marlins in Burque and I promise Burqueños will come out -- we don't have the humidity!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Bleacher Report made a pitch for Greensboro.

So, can we please do the Marlins organization a favor and get them out of there? I'm sure that they would even get better attendance numbers in Greensboro, NC, where the Marlins' single-A farm club occasionally outdraws them in a 9,000 person stadium.

I'm pretty sure there were a couple of bloggers somewhere who made a pitch for Jupiter and Zebulon, but I didn't find them in my travels on the Web.

But it is nice to know that a couple of very generous host are offering the team a couch to crash on if everything turns out for the worse.

Someone cue Sister Sledge: We are Family...

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