MIAMI _ The T-shirts convey the disrespect that surrounded these Miami Marlins entering this strangest of baseball seasons and has fueled them throughout it.
MIAMI BOTTOM-FEEDERS, the shirts proclaim.
The Marlins wore them during batting practice Friday. That was just before they swept their playoff series at Wrigley Field to advance to next week's National League Division Series against the waiting Atlanta Braves.
Do you respect the Marlins yet, America?
The Chicago Cubs do.
Miami beat the Cubs, 2-0, on Friday, led by Sixto Sanchez's five shutout innings and Garrett Cooper's scoreless-tie-busting solo home run in the seventh inning. They won as they had Wednesday in a 5-1 win sparked by Sandy Alacantara's strong outing and a pair of homers.
The sweep in the best-of-3 NL wild-card series sends Miami on to the NLDS in the club's first postseason in 17 years.
And keeps alive the franchise's improbable perfect record in the playoffs.
In Marlins history the club has appeared in only three postseasons but has won seven series in them: 3 for 3 for in 1997, 3 for 3 in 2003, and now taking the first one in '20.
As for the bottom-feeders nickname the Fish have embraced, the seed from which it grew came courtesy of an NBC-TV analyst from Philadelphia. It was late July. The season much-delayed by the coronavirus/COVID-19 had finally begun and the Phillies had just lost, 7-1, to Miami.
"You can't afford to lose to bottom-feeders like the Marlins," admonished the TV guy on the air.
It has become a rallying cry for a Marlins team that might also answer to America's Underdogs. The team that lost 105 games last season and began this one with 18 players testing positive for the virus, causing a spate of postponements.
Miami reached the playoffs at 31-29 in the truncated 60-game season with a recipe of strong starting pitching, speed and clutch hitting, and advanced in the same way.
Alcantara and Sanchez smoked the Cubs on a heavy diet of fastballs.
Clutch hitting? The Fish were only 11th of 15 NL clubs in runs scored, but plated 46.4% of those runs with two outs, leading the majors.
Big starting pitching? Alcantara did in Game 1, Sanchez pitched a gem Friday, toe to toe with Cubs Cy Young contender Yu Darvish.
Sanchez, the 22-year-old Dominican, lost his grandmother to COVID earlier this summer. Before his first pitch he wrote her name in the dirt of the pitcher's mound, picked up a handful and rubbed it on his uniform, over his heart.
Sanchez hit 100 mph on his second fastball. He kept 'em coming.
The Cubs this year batted only .195 vs. fastballs that hit 95-plus, worst in the majors.
Sanchez's 97.6 was the third-fastest fastball average speed of anybody.
No surprise, then, that Sanchez pitched five shutout innings before departing a 0-0 game after reaching 90 pitches.
The Marlins were without a big bat Friday in Starling Marte, out of the lineup after a pitch in Game 1 hit him on the left hand, but got all the offense needed with Cooper's solo homer and then Magneuris Sierra's RBI single.
Year 3 of the Derek Jeter rebuild was not supposed to get this far.
"Trust me," Jeter essentially told Marlins fans as he began trading star players for prospects.
It was a tough sell.
No more.
Now everybody sees it is working.
But the Marlins ending a 17-year franchise playoff doesn't mean the work is done. Means it is just getting started.
"A stepping-stone," Jeter calls 2020 and the Marlins' miracle wrapped in a pandemic.
"The beginning, not the end," is the way manager Don Mattingly puts it.
It has been the season tucked into a global pandemic and played in empty stadiums that saw the splendidly improbable rise of the Miami Marlins _ the Bottom Feeders.
Said Mattingly: "I'm going to have to write a book after this!"
Not yet, though. One more chapter left this year. One more, at least.
