With Day 1 of the 6,456 day baseball season approaching quickly, young players are busting their asses to try to make opening day rosters, while the savvy veterans are trying just hard enough to make sure they don’t split their pants on routine fly balls. But something that we don’t hear a lot about in the MLB preseason is how the owners prepare, so I thought I’d take this chance to check in with everyone’s favorite owner, Jeffrey Loria, to see how he’s getting ready for the 2013 season.

Loria’s Miami Marlins already had a pretty tumultuous offseason, as he traded the team’s highest paid players after just one season in the brand new stadium, which he built with taxpayer money after promising to sign high-priced talent. That led to fans demanded that Loria sell the team, which he won’t do, and he tried to quell the turbulent waters of hatred by promising the team’s most loyal fans that everything would be okay.

Translated: The Marlins are suing two longtime season ticket holders.

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The Miami Marlins invited their fans to their special Winter Warm-Up event on Saturday, presumably with cards that read, “Giancarlo Stanton may hate us, but he’s still here”, and it went about as well as you’d expect. That picture above, tweeted by the Palm Beach Post’s Marlins beat writer Joe Capozzi, shows the entire line of people waiting to purchase single game tickets when they went on sale at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Four whole people. To put that into perspective, here’s a picture of the line for New York Yankees tickets*.

The good news is that season ticket sales were reportedly only down 4% from last season, which is a surprise considering the Marlins traded away the team’s biggest stars only a month ago. But perhaps fans remain optimistic because they think that maligned owner Jeffrey Loria is finally going to cave to his villainous public perception and sell the team so that someone more concerned with building a winning franchise can take over and reverse the ongoing humiliation.

Tough titties, folks, because Loria doesn’t give a fish fart.

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Remember earlier this year when a dozen or so Miami Dolphins fans showed up to Joe Robbie Pro Player Sun Life their stadium to protest the ongoing employment of general manager Jeff Ireland and everyone was like, “Awwwww, those poor fans think they can make Stephen Ross make good decisions”? Well, Miami Marlins fans just made those Phins fans and their “Fireland” signs look like the million man march.

With news today that the blockbuster trade between the Miami Marlins and Toronto Blue Jays has been finalized, fans of South Florida’s embattled baseball franchise flocked to their year-old stadium to express their disdain with owner Jeffrey Loria for trading away half of their team for a group of players that doesn’t even include the Blue Jays’ top prospect. And as anyone would have expected, you could count the Marlins fans protesting on one hand.

But commissioner Bud Selig ain’t care, because this trade is in the best interest of something, apparently.

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If you didn’t see enough of it last night as the news initially broke, you’re going to see plenty of columns, editorials and fiery rants today about how Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria is a scumbag because he is willingly killing his second baseball franchise because he’s horrible at what he does. And many of them will be great – I like this effort by Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan and this more subtle rundown by Deadspin – because as much as writers, analysts and experts love to argue about every little meaningless thing in sports, hatred for Loria runs deep within the majority. Jeffrey Loria destroyed the Montreal Expos and now he is destroying the Miami Marlins. That’s pretty much all you need to know.

So why? Why did the Marlins trade Jose Reyes, Josh Johnson, John Buck, Emilio Bonifacio and Mark Buehrle to the Toronto Blue Jays for Yunel Escobar and several prospects that don’t even include Toronto’s best? Was it a brilliant move to clear money? Was it an admittance of mistakes in even signing Reyes and Buehrle in the first place? Was it just the same old fire sale that we’ve come to expect from the Marlins? Or is it more likely the story of a man under investigation by the SEC for allegedly fleecing the city of Miami in the construction of a new baseball stadium that he couldn’t even fill with a stable of stars because he already created a product so tainted within the community that people refuse to buy in until his stink is washed away?

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You will read this line in every Adam Greenberg story, including this one.

This is a great story for anyone who believes in second chances!

In the film Field Of Dreams, as in real life, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham who appeared as a right fielder in a single major league game for the New York Giants, but never got an at-bat. Through some combination of Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones and time-traveling magics, a young Archie gets a second chance to play against some of the best players of his day. After some sage advice from Shoeless Joe Jackson, Graham hits a sac fly to right, scoring a run and jogging back to his bench to a chorus of “AWRIGHT, KID,” or whatever dead people from the 20s would say.

Adam Greenberg got an at-bat, but it wasn’t something he’d like to remember. The then-Chicago Cub was blasted in the head with a 92-mph fastball during the first pitch of his MLB career. Through some combination of gusty determination, six years in the Independent Leagues and a generous opportunity from the Miami Marlins, Greenberg was given a one-day contract to appear in Miami’s game against the New York Mets on Tuesday. The video is below. Cue the Field of Dreams music.

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Watching analysis and listening to announcers debate the accuracy of Aramis Ramirez striking out swinging without swinging (you read that correctly) is so boring you’ll feel like you sat through a powerpoint presentation by the end, but it’s something that needs to be seen.

Here’s what happens: Aramis Ramirez ducks a ball in on the hands, it clips his bat on the way across and the catcher reaches up to snag it. The umpire, going on sound, calls him out. Ramirez claims it hit his hand. It didn’t, and in a world where refs and umpires almost never seem to get it right, a guy made a quick call and nailed it. Ramirez struck out swinging without moving his bat.

It’s a perfect example of how the complexities of pro baseball make it the finest sport ever organized by man. It’s also a perfect example of how baseball is f**king NyQuil in sports-form.

[h/t Big League Stew]