Over at Deadspin, they’re having some fun at the Miami Marlins’ expense, and for good reason. The team has lost twenty-five of its first thirty-five games, and is now shuttering the upper deck of its ballpark on weeknights, in hopes of creating a “better fan experience.” After years of drawing minuscule crowds while playing in a seventy-five-thousand-person football stadium, the Marlins built a cozy new park—at a capacity of thirty-seven thousand**,** the third-smallest in the majors—and then found that, with a team this bad, even it needs to be shrunk by another ten thousand seats in order to create the illusion of dynamism. Cutting costs is something the Marlins are known for doing well—too well, perhaps. It seems only fitting that**,** after dumping a hundred and sixty-four million dollars of player salaries last winter, they’ve come up with a sure way of saving on concessions and custodial expenses, too.

The typical villain in any Marlins-bashing scenario is Jeffrey Loria, the Manhattan art dealer who owns the team, but to my mind the more appealing rogue is Loria’s stepson David Samson, a former investment banker who serves as the team’s president and public face. Samson speaks more candidly than many people in his position would dare. Last year, he told a group of local businessmen that Miami’s politicians were not “the intellectual cream of the crop.” Who could argue? It was politicians, after all, who bought the line the Marlins’ owners were selling, and green-lit hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing for a stadium that would, a little more than a year after it was finished, turn out to have a superfluous upper deck. I met Samson last spring while reporting a piece about the franchise’s full-scale re-branding effort. He reminded me that teams can’t really be trusted to report their own attendance and sales figures accurately when he acknowledged, without hesitation, that the Marlins had been inflating season-ticket numbers for years. He wasn’t embarrassed by the gamesmanship, just by the unpopularity that inspired it. His realism was so refreshing that it was almost possible to believe his conviction that the new ballpark would change everything.

“The easiest way to stay on budget is you have to be an asshole,” Samson said, while leading me on a tour of the grounds. “We didn’t spend any money where fans don’t go.” He was referring not to the upper deck but to the field level, beneath the pricey seats. “We don’t need a drop ceiling here, we don’t need to do anything to the concrete—don’t need color on these tiles,” Samson went on. “We don’t need shit.”

It all sounds so sensibly cynical! But the tragic thing is that Samson also told me that the Marlins could have built a new stadium in 2005, were it not for their wish to have a retractable roof—a sticking point that required holding out for more years and more money, at the taxpayers’ great expense. The roof, Samson was proud to point out, is more environmentally friendly than any that came before it—LEED-certified gold. It also retracted just eight times last season, owing to everyone’s apparent preference for air conditioning. It might as well have been a conventional dome.

This season, the Marlins have pointed out, the roof is more active; they’ve already equalled last year’s total of open-sky days. And their paid attendance is back down to within a hundred per game of what it was in their final year at Sun Life Stadium, as a tenant of the Dolphins.

Photograph by Marc Serota/Getty