Season 2 of “The Franchise” on Showtime debuted last Wednesday and I finally got a chance to watch the first episode. The show is following the Miami Marlins this season after covering the San Francisco Giants last year. All things considered, their choice to follow the Marlins was an excellent one; the team just moved into a new park, rebranded, got new colors and uniforms, and signed a bunch of high-priced free agents in the offseason. Oh yeah, and they also signed the game’s most colorful manager — Ozzie Guillen.
I’ve said before that you could stick a camera on Ozzie for every hour of the day and I’d watch that show. We don’t quite have Ozzie 24/7, but this is close enough. And it didn’t take long for Guillen to make his presence felt on the show.
The speech Ozzie delivered to his team before their first game of the season was about as profanity-laced as it gets. The cuss words he used have not been edited out to preserve the authenticity of his speech. Proceed if you don’t mind reading the F-word every sentence. (language NSFW)
“Every fucking day we want people to hate this fucking ball club … because the manager is a fucking big mouth. He’s arrogant, he’s cocky, whatever it is — I want them to fucking hate us. Because when people hate somebody, it’s because they’re fucking good. Good teams win a lot of games. Horseshit teams, they have a lot of meetings. Hopefully the next meeting we have for you guys is going to be in the All-Star break and fucking the first game of the playoffs.
“Good luck, let’s take (?). And everybody on this fucking stay together. Let’s go kick some ass.”
Inspiring stuff, no doubt. The best part was when the cameras flashed to new Marlin Jose Reyes who couldn’t help but laugh about one sentence and two f-bombs into the speech. Of course Guillen’s tune changed quickly when he was grilled for his moronic, insensitive, and downright idiotic comments about Fidel Castro. In hindsight, he’s lucky he still has a job.
After focusing on setting up the season, and then Guillen’s controversy, the show began focusing on some main figures from the team: Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Reyes (and his return to New York), Heath Bell, Carlos Zambrano, and the acquisition of Carlos Lee. The editing and commentary was excellent, and the show was very enjoyable.
One interesting takeaway from the show is that I didn’t realize how close Hanley Ramirez and Jose Reyes are. The two were joined at the hip at every moment the show displayed either one. It was also funny hearing Carlos Zambrano try to convince everyone how much he’s matured.
Other fantastic moments were Ozzie Guillen’s wife heckling the umpire during a charity softball game, and Logan Morrison bitching during the credits about barely getting any face time during the first episode. That was classic.
Photo credit: Robert Mayer-US PRESSWIRE
