Time To 'Occupy The Marlins'

The numbers are staggering. Jose Reyes, $106 million. Mark Buehrle, $58 million. Heath Bell, $27 million. A reported $10 million for manager Ozzie Guillen, who according to rough sabermetric consensus is worth, at most, an extra three wins a season discount MLB jerseys . Oh, and don't forget a $200 million offer to Albert Pujols, the prize pony of this year's free agent class.

To say that the notoriously parsimonious Miami Marlins -- what if Scrooge McDuck owned a baseball team, and also fancied teal? -- are suddenly throwing around greenbacks like drunken sailors isn't just clichéd; it's an insult to Joseph Hazelwood. And also a bad analogy. Because frankly, the Marlins aren't spending like intoxicated swabbies with a few hours of shore leave. They're spending like perfectly sober investment bankers.

And that's why it's time to Occupy the Marlins.

Following the financial meltdown of 2008, President Bush diagnosed the deus ex machina of the Great Recession like this: "Wall Street got drunk." He was wrong. Wall Street did not get drunk. Wall Street got over. Wall Street made billions underwriting crappy mortgagees, repackaging them as Triple-A investments and peddling them to naïve investors (read: your 401(k), state pension plans); made billions more placing side bets on and against the preceding criminal, but not technically criminal practice; made billions on top of that when the whole unsustainable shell game went belly up, thanks to a massive, unprecedented influx of taxpayer cash -- again: your money -- via TARP and the Federal Reserve's money-for-nothing "discount window," which in turn allowed financial houses to keep handing out the kind of outsized salaries and bonuses that had Travis Snider Jersey #45 the encamped residents of Zuccotti Park so peeved.

Over in the sports world, the Marlins are running the same basic con.

"They're finally spending money? That's a misnomer," says Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for the League of Fans, a Washington, D.C.-based fan advocacy group affiliated with consumer advocate Ralph Nader. "To me, it's more like taxpayers have funded the entry fee into this high-priced fantasy league, and the Marlins are going off and buying players with our money. I think this will go down as the ultimate case of corporate sports welfare gone bad."

Sick of corporate bailouts? Occupy the Marlins.

Tired of seeing your hard-earned tax dollars line the pockets of people already in the top one percent of income earners, such as Goldman Sachs executives and team owners and goateed closers? Occupy the Marlins.

Looking to take a stand against the ever-escalating cost of being a sports fan, ever-escalating government spending or Toronto Blue Jays jersey cheap the ever-escalating sense that wealthy special interests are taking the general public for a ride? Occupy the Marlins.

The time is now.

Admittedly, the place is a bit unexpected.

For most of their 18-year history, the Marlins have pinched pennies with a vigor typically reserved for turning coal into diamonds. Twice, the franchise won the World Series; twice, it immediately dismantled its roster in fire-sale fashion, the better to avoid paying star players market-level salaries. And that was just fine. It's a free country. No public subsidy, no problem.

But no longer. Last week, the Marlins spent $191 million on three players -- almost as much as the $210 million the club spent on its total roster combined during the past six seasons. Reportedly, the team is looking to add more talent, presumably followed by additional champagne toasts on the club's private jet. What changed? Only this: The franchise is moving into a new $634 million ballpark, a retractable roof Xanadu-cum-stadium-sized ATM in Little Havana that figures to MLB jerseys wholesale make team owner Jeffrey Loria even richer, largely because he