Fish and Chips

JUPITER, Fla. —  The Florida Marlins will soon have rings on their fingers to match the chips on their shoulders.

If a little umbrage never hurts, the Marlins are displaying a lot of it as they prepare to defend their World Series title.

After all, they ask, didn’t they have the best record in baseball (73-49) after Jack McKeon became their manager on May 11? And didn’t they take it to those megabuck New York Yankees in the Series after cutting up the San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs?

Don’t people realize, as center fielder Juan Pierre put it, that their young rotation may be the bedrock of a dynasty, or as outfielder Jeff Conine said: “Depending how they handle the expectations, the sky’s the limit.”

Umbrage?

The Marlins think they’re being dissed by the prognosticators, who almost unanimously tab the Philadelphia Phillies as the team to beat in the National League East. Some even give play to the retrenching Atlanta Braves and slightly revitalized New York Mets ahead of the Series champs.

“Maybe we needed to beat Babe Ruth and the ’27 Yankees,” Conine said, as if beating the ’03 Yankees weren’t convincing enough.

Reliever Chad Fox winked and said, “Didn’t we embarrass the Yankees enough that they had to go out and get the best player in baseball?”

He referred, of course, to New York’s acquisition of Alex Rodriguez, and asked, “Where’s our respect?”

Well, at least the city of Alexandria, La., provided a little, holding a day in Pierre’s honor.

Otherwise, the animated leadoff man speculated, maybe all of this would further fuel the Marlins’ motivation.

“I think it’s good,” Pierre said. “I think it will help us keep our intensity. We’re still young with a lot to prove, but we have the pitching to build a dynasty.

“We want to do what the Yankees and Oakland A’s have been doing every year.”

Is it possible that the lack of respect stems from a perception that the Marlins simply caught lightning?

Or does it really stem from the off-season roster moves that left fans in South Florida, nerves still raw from the decimation of the 1997 World Series winner, fearing that the economic band saw was cutting through the heart of the team again?

Conine, a victim of the ’97 purge, insisted this “wasn’t comparable, wasn’t even close.”

That was a dismantling. This, he said, was nothing more than changing a few pieces in the puzzle, the types of moves every team makes in the off-season.

“We kept the nucleus,” Conine said. “We kept the pitching and defense you have to have to win championships.”

Perhaps, but the 2004 puzzle still may be tougher to solve.

Catcher Ivan Rodriguez, first baseman Derrek Lee, outfielder Juan Encarnacion, starting pitcher Mark Redman, closers Ugueth Urbina and Braden Looper all left, through trade or free agency.

“Look,” said club President David Samson, “we definitely face some revenue realities, but anyone who says we broke up the team is simply wrong. Check the transaction wire. Every club makes changes in the off-season.”

The company line is obvious.

Less obvious are the answers to these questions:

* Can the Marlins replace the 271 runs that Rodriguez, Lee and Encarnacion drove in?

* Can the mercurial Armando Benitez, a $3.5-million off-season acquisition, replace Urbina and Looper as closer?

* Can a catching combination of Ramon Castro (who faces a rape allegation) and Mark Redmond compensate for the multiple abilities of Rodriguez, the division series MVP who at 36 wasn’t offered half the four-year, $40-million contract he received from the Detroit Tigers?

“It was a great marriage while it lasted,” Samson said of the one-year honeymoon with I-Rod. “But Pudge and his representative made it very clear what they wanted and never strayed. There are no hard feelings. Pudge Rodriguez will have a permanent place in our history.”

With no assurance of a new stadium, the Marlins will begin the season with a payroll of about $53 million, similar to last year’s.

Season tickets -- down to about 200 when Jeffrey Loria bought the team in the spring of 2002 -- may reach 8,000, up about 3,000 from last year, when the May arrival of charismatic rookie Dontrelle Willis triggered an attendance boom in the wasteland of Pro Player Stadium. The Marlins drew 1.34 million, up from 813,111, and hope to have that many tickets sold before the new season starts.

Reality, however, is still reality.

Rodriguez and Lee, in particular, loom as major lineup losses of an off-season in which the Marlins were determined to create the financial flexibility to keep their starting pitching intact and retain second baseman Luis Castillo.

Castillo, who forms a catalytic duo with Pierre at the top of the lineup, tested free agency but ultimately returned with a three-year, $15.5-million contract.

Now, the Marlins hope to compensate for the missing RBIs through the continued aggressiveness of Pierre and Castillo, the ongoing emergence of outfielder Miguel Cabrera and a full season with Conine, reacquired in the second half, and third baseman Mike Lowell, sidelined down the stretch by a broken hand.

The Marlins also should have the resources to make a late-season acquisition if they’re in the race, as they did with Conine and Urbina last year.

“Besides,” said Lowell, “with our pitching, there shouldn’t be a lot of pressure on the offense or too many times when we have to get into a slugging contest with another team.

“Even with Pudge, Derrek and Juan, we didn’t have that type of attack. We create opportunities and take advantage of them.”

The touted rotation of World Series MVP Josh Beckett, Brad Penny, Carl Pavano and Willis was 43-28 with a 2.70 earned-run average after McKeon took over.

The average age is 25, and that won’t be damaged too severely if A.J. Burnett, 27 and possibly the most talented of the group, returns from elbow reconstruction as expected in May.

“These guys are just coming into their prime,” McKeon said. “Their potential is enormous.”

At 73, McKeon can’t believe his good fortune.

A year ago, he was unemployed, rocking quietly on the porch of his North Carolina home when he wasn’t watching grandson Kellan McKeon win a state high school wrestling championship.

Now he is managing a World Series winner, having gone to the playoffs for the first time in his fifth managerial stint.

Now too he is coming off a winter in which he received several manager-of-the-year awards, appeared on David Letterman’s show among other TV and banquet appearances, and was even saluted by the American Assn. of Retired Persons as one of its 10 people of the year.

He has a humidor full of free cigars, a basically set team, the hope his 25 players can restore the chemistry of last year -- “I’ve never had a group bond like that one did,” he said -- and the challenge of learning a few Korean words to communicate with new first baseman Hee Seop Choi.

“It’s still hard to believe,” McKeon said, reflecting on the events since May 11. “After 50 years in the game, you hope for that one more chance, never knowing if you’re going to get it, and then you catch a miracle.

“I don’t mean a miracle in the sense of taking away from the way we played. People forget we had the best record over the last five months of the season. I mean a miracle from the personal standpoint of all those years.”

McKeon thinks about it every morning when he attends Mass. He is one Marlin with no reason to take umbrage.