Fort Myers Miracle

119

Fort Myers is, as best as I can determine, good for one thing: visiting in the winter. That's not just my opinion. Two of the major attractions in Fort Myers are Thomas Edison's winter estate and Henry Ford's winter estate. Those winter estates, incidentally, are next door to each other. In fact it's a bit of a lie to call them two of the major attractions in Fort Myers, because today they're a single entity. Fort Myers is also where Harvey Firestone, founder of Firestone Tire Company, spent his winters. None of them, to the best of my knowledge, made a habit of spending their summers there. I've been to the Edison/Ford Estates in April, and I understand why none of them spent their summers there. It's bad enough in April.

This sort of wintering goes on to this day, of course. When I was down there, my mom (I was visiting my parents) was commenting that in Florida you don't know it's spring because of the arrival of birds or flowers or anything like that, you know because you go from half of the license plates on cars saying "New York" or "Ontario" or "New Jersey" to the majority of plates saying "Florida". This is a happy time according to my parents. Apparently it's too crowded during the winter. It's much less crowded in the summer. During the summer my parents actually park one of their cars in a neighbor's driveway, because the neighbors aren't using it since they're up in Canada. That's how much less crowded it is.

This is not without consequences for businesses in Florida. In particular, it has consequences for baseball teams in Florida. In 2014 the Tampa Bay Rays rank last in Major League Baseball attendance, and the Miami Marlins were fourth from the bottom. In 2013, the Rays and Marlins were the two bottom teams. And the minors are no better. I'm not going to go through every single team, but comparing the league averages should tell you all you need to know:

Were it not for the Appalachian League, the Florida State League would be at the bottom in attendance. The Florida State League isn't just beaten out by the other High-A leagues, it's also beaten by all of the Low-A and Short-Season-A leagues. Even one of the rookie leagues has higher attendance, despite being in a portion of the country where nobody lives. But then, apparently that's like a lot of Florida in the summer. All the baseball fans who live in Florida don't go to Florida State League games, because they only live in Florida during the winter. During baseball season they're up in New Jersery or wherever.

All of this raises one obvious question: Why does the Florida State League even exist?

The answer, it seems, is that a lot of FSL teams are owned by their Major League affiliate and play in the same stadium where the Major League team has its spring training. In other words, the Major League team has to build and maintain the stadium either way, so they can get a little extra revenue by using it for a minor league team after spring training ends. That reduces costs. Reduced costs mean that the team can still be viable despite revenues being much lower.

In other words, the Florida State League compared to other leagues uses the same business model that reality TV uses compared to scripted shows. The Florida State League is the Amish Mafia of baseball.

This probably also explains why about a third of the FSL teams use the same nickname and (with some slight modifications) logo as the parent team. Why bother? But apparently some teams think it is worth the effort, and the Miracle are one of them. But looking at the logo, I'm not entirely sure why. There's nothing really miraculous about a palm tree or a sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico. There's also nothing really Fort Myers about a sailboat in the Gulf of Mexico, for that matter. Fort Myers doesn't touch the shore. True, a large portion of the city borders the Caloosahatchee River not too terribly far from where it empties into Gulf. But come on, we're talking about Florida here. You can only be so far from either the Gulf or the Atlantic Ocean in Florida. They ought to come up with a logo that is more specific to Fort Myers and less generic to Florida. After all, that might attract more people to the– oh, right. Yeah, never mind. It's not like anyone's really there to notice. Go ahead and use whatever logo you want, guys.

Final Score: 119 points.
Penalties: Singular, 15 pts; Alliteration, 5 pts; Scenery, 11 pts; Equipment, 13 pts; Letter, 24 pts; Irrelevance, 39 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: None.