Florida Marlins Recruiting Male Dancers: Of Marlins and Manatees

You're a major league baseball team. You've been in existence for 15 years, during which you've won 2 World Series. Your first year of operation, you carried a 64-98 record, but had an average attendance of 37,800 per game, 5^th in the league for attendance. The only other time you've reached 5^th was the year you first won the World Series. After that, attendance has been sliding: in 8 of the last 9 years attendance has been either last or second to last in the league; the 9^th year in that sequence attendance was 14^th of 16.

Something has to be done to get attendance up from the just under 17,000 who attended each game in 2007. The answer? Cheerleaders!

Or more specifically, "Sea Cows."

While the NBA's Boston Celtics created a dance team last year to drum up fan support, keep the paying customers in their seats and, presumably, buying tickets, the Marlins have gone one step farther. In fact, the Marlins are following the 2002 lead of the Dallas Mavericks' "ManiACCS" and Chicago Bulls' 2003 trotting out of "The Matadors."

The Marlins will be fielding an all-male, all...rotund cheer/dance squad called the Manatees.

The Manatees will be the first such squad for a Major League Baseball team. The 10 men selected to become Manatees will perform on Friday and Saturday home games throughout the 2008 season. For compensation, they'll receive admission to the games at which they perform. And you thought Major League Baseball was spending money hand over fist to field talent. The Marlins' average ticket price in 2007 was $16.57 (26th of 30 teams), meaning that each game fielding the Manatees will run the Marlins about $170 in compensation for the exposition of their talent. They might even increase concession sales.

The Manatees will compliment, if the thought of 10 overweight men performing choreographed dance could be considered a compliment, the existing all-female dance/cheer troupe the Florida Mermaids. While the Manatees will perform only on Fridays and Saturdays, the Mermaids perform at all 81 home games throughout the season.

The "Mermaids" are generally considered to be attractive, the aforementioned attendance data suggests they have not been instrumental in attracting attendance since their inception in 2003 as the first such squad in baseball.

Last week, the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County approved a new stadium for the Marlins which will keep the Marlins in Miami through 2046 once it opens in 2011. It will have a seating capacity of about 37,000, a small increase from that of the Dolphins Stadium baseball configuration.