Just when you thought the Marlins had used up all their "creativity" on their new logo, they've gone out and stunned us again.
The "new mechanized sculpture that will activate when the team hits a home run" at the new ballpark according to a Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs website made its debut today.
And there really are no words to describe it. Stomach it if you can... (FYI, Click on the picture to see it in action. It will move and show you how it is supposed to work).
Marlins owner and art dealer Jeffrey Loria promised in 2009 the team’s new ballpark would be a work of art and unlike any other baseball stadium. It looks like that will be the case -- for better or worse. This "piece of art", budgeted at $2.5 million, is the work of renowned multimedia pop artist Red Grooms.
Grooms, who was born in Nashville, said in 2009 he gathered his concept for the home run celebration on his memories of visiting Daytona Beach as a teenager and how what it was like seeing the ocean for the first time.
Home runs are celebrated various ways at ballparks across the country.
At Miller Park in Milwaukee, following every Brewers home run, mascot Bernie Brewer makes a splash in the "Kalahari Splash Zone" area, which sends an explosion of water into the air and onto fans below.
At Minute Maid Park in Houston, a train moves along a track on top of the length of the exterior wall beyond left field. The engine's tender, traditionally used to carry coal, is filled with giant oranges in tribute to Minute Maid's most famous product, orange juice.
At Citi Field in New York, when a Mets player hits a home run, the giant apple, which has a Mets logo on the front that lights up, rises from its housing beyond the center field wall.
At Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, two smokestacks in right field, reminiscent of the steamboats that were common on the Ohio River in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, flash lights, emit smoke and launch fireworks.
After a White Sox hit a home run at U.S. Cellualar Field, fireworks go off, the scoreboard lights up and a pin wheel spins.
And at Petco Park in San Diego, every time the Padres hit a home run, a foghorn is sounded and fireworks are shot off in center field. The foghorn is a recording of the horn of the Navy's USS Ronald Reagan, a nuclear aircraft carrier that is ported in San Diego.
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