Written by Michael Lewis on October 29, 2025
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With the baseball season ending, fans watching the World Series this week were inundated with statistics. No other sport pays as much attention to percentages and numbers and records of every player and team and trend and how long the records have stood.
We even learn about audiences. Between 15% and 25% of the Canada’s entire population has viewed on television Toronto’s battle against last year’s winner Los Angeles in the first world championship since the 1990s to actually feature teams of two nations.
In Miami, where baseball has sunk below soccer to be the fifth-level professional sport in public interest, the Marlins this year rose to the mid-level team in their division in wins and losses but nosedived in the number of people who actually go to a game here.
That’s painful on multiple levels.
From a pure sports perspective, the Marlins are competitive and on a given day as good as anyone.
From a leisure perspective, a day at Miami’s ballpark isn’t pricy compared with other entertainment, and the stadium itself is comfortable.
Most noteworthy, however, is that the lack of attendance underscores what many rank as the worst local government buy in history, which is that comfortable but mostly vacant stadium.
That’s because the people of Miami-Dade County own the stadium, which will cost them about $3 billion when it’s all paid off – and though the stadium opened in 2012, we’re still paying just a small fraction each year of what we borrowed to build it. So while fans aren’t paying for tens of thousands of empty seats, the public is going to get hit with their cost in coming years.
The public was conned into building the stadium by team owners who said that with their low attendance playing in what is now Hard Rock Stadium they couldn’t afford top players and as a result were moving to Las Vegas unless we built them a better home. They boasted after we approved the stadium that they never intended to move – but that’s another story.
So, as in sports, let’s look at the numbers.
In 2008, when the Marlins were getting a stadium approved, they had the worst attendance in baseball in their home city, averaging 16,688 people a game. So we built them a stadium, and it opened with 27,400 average game attendance in 2012.
But that was a one-season wonder. This year, with a rapidly improving team, attendance in Miami was 14,276, which was 28thamong the 30 teams – it wasn’t dead last only because the two lowest-attended teams weren’t playing in their home cities at all. Miami was doing worse in drawing fans than when it was playing in a football stadium.
It’s not that taxpayers would benefit from more attendance: in making the worst deal in county history, the team keeps all the money from attendance, concessions, advertising, sponsorships and television rights – in fact, everything but parking in City of Miami garages, where it splits revenues with the city. The team can hold all sorts of non-baseball events in the stadium too and keep the proceeds.
The deal also prevented professional soccer from playing nearby, which led to a soccer stadium that’s rising on Miami’s former golf course instead and is likely to get far more attendance than the Marlins’ stadium.
But the big fallout is going to come from paying off the bonds with which the county financed the stadium.
Of the three bond issues, one for $91.2 million at 8.2% interest will cost $1.2 billion in debt service payments before it’s finally paid off in 2047, and one for $319.3 million at 6.39% interest will cost $1.3 billion to pay off by 2049. The third is for a piddling $50 million.
The vast majority of all that money is yet to be repaid. The $91.2 million issue actually raised about $80 million for the stadium and will see annual payoffs of more than $80 million for nine consecutive years, with payments for six of those years of $118 million apiece – a total repayment of an incredible 15 times the amount borrowed.
Those are the kind of sports statistics that get buried under the home run records and win-loss percentages on the field but will be felt for another quarter of a century.
The winner of the World Series is in the league’s record books.
The loser of baseball in Miami is in the taxpayers’ pocketbooks.