This story was excerpted from Christina De Nicola’s Marlins Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
MIAMI — The timing couldn’t have been better to induct Jack McKeon into the Marlins Legends Hall of Fame last Sunday.
The upstart Marlins were hours away from sweeping the Yankees, the same storied organization that the franchise took down to capture its second World Series championship in 2003 under the guidance of McKeon.
The 2003 Marlins became the second team in baseball history to win a World Series championship despite being 10 or more games below .500 (as low as 19–29) at some point in the season; the other team was the 1914 Boston Braves.
“Yeah, I do,” McKeon said of seeing the similarities before the sweep. “The way they’re coming back and almost at .500 now, and [I] hope they get there today. That reminds me a little bit of 2003 when we started off slow and all of a sudden we caught fire.”
On May 11, 2003, the Marlins fired manager Jeff Torborg and would go on to hire McKeon. The club would drop to 19-29 on May 22, but it finished 72-42 for the best record in the Majors from then until the end of the regular season.
McKeon, then 72, would go on to become the oldest manager in MLB history to lead his team to a World Series title, as the Marlins took down the Giants, Cubs and Yankees in the postseason. They were the underdog in each series.
“2003 was a very special season, especially for South Florida,” McKeon said. “We brought that area alive. There was so much joy and the fans were so proud.
“… It was a lot of fun. Fans were tremendous. As I will mention today in the speech, ‘You were our 10th player,’ and the fans pushed all the way. And I hope they’ll do the same thing with this young, exciting team that they have.”
McKeon did just that during Sunday’s pregame ceremony, speaking to how unselfish the 2003 ballclub was by playing for the name on the front of its jersey rather than the one on the back. Retired Marlins Jeff Conine, Antonio Alfonseca, Michael Tejera and Luis Castillo (who will be inducted into the Marlins Legends Hall of Fame on Aug. 24) listened as McKeon urged the fans to fill up the ballpark for the 2025 team brimming with confidence.
So did first-time manager Clayton McCullough, who has been able to meet with two of the game’s more legendary skippers this season. Last month, he also received advice from Hall of Famer Jim Leyland before his own induction into Marlins Legends Hall of Fame.
McCullough marveled at how sharp McKeon remains at 94 years young. The pair bonded over mutual connections in North Carolina.
McKeon, who resides about 20 miles from Duke University, got to watch injured outfielder Griffin Conine play college ball. McKeon, of course, managed Griffin’s dad, Jeff, from 2003-05. Last year, when McKeon had his number retired by the Omaha Royals, the Triple-A affiliate was facing Griffin’s Jacksonville squad.
“[He’d been] following the team some and had some nice things to say, which was great, and [he] talked about ’03,” McCullough said. “He came into it X amount of games down, and how he just told the guys, ‘Get into the postseason.’ It was just ‘play free,’ and kind of like, ‘No one expected us to be here anyway, and go enjoy it. Like, what do we have to lose?’ So I was like, ‘Jack, that sounds great, because each day we come here, we have nothing to lose either.’”
