The most ridiculous part about the most ridiculous trade in memory is how quickly the Marlins gave up on themselves, their fans, their players, their new stadium and their city. Sure, there have been salary dumps before. And there will be salary dumps again. But this one broke the land-speed record.

It hasn’t even been a year since the Marlins signed Heath Bell and signed Jose Reyes and signed Mark Buehrle. It has barely been a year since they traded for Ozzie Guillen. It was just months ago that the Marlins ownership and management talked about being all in, this was it, new stadium, new attitude, new name (Miami Marlins! Catchy!), finally the Marlins were going to court and win over Miami. Finally. After 19 years of stops and starts, sudden success and shocking collapse, big payouts and massive sell-offs, the Marlins were going to be relevant. For real. This time.

I’m not saying most people bought into the hype.

But I think even the most cynical people thought the hype would last beyond November.

There’s no mistaking the Marlins’ 12-player trade with Toronto. I spent much of the day on Wednesday at the MLB Network talking about this, and one question that kept coming up was: “Could this actually work out for the Marlins?” And the answer to that is pretty simple: Anything CAN work out. If you put Justin Verlander at catcher it could work out, conceivably.

But I would argue -- not that too many people WOULD argue -- that this trade wasn’t meant to work out, not like that. The Marlins traded Josh Johnson, Mark Buehrle and Jose Reyes to Toronto and did not even get the guy widely viewed as the Blue Jays’ best prospect, Travis d’Arnaud. The best prospect they got in the trade, probably, is outfielder Jake Marisnick, who hit .233 in a half season in Double-A last year but whom scouts think is “toolsy.” That means he might be a star ... and he might not be an every-day big league player. The other prospects don’t have as much upside. But it doesn’t really matter, because this clearly wasn’t a case of building for the future. This was a case of a team looking for someone who would take the financial burden. If they get a player or two out of it, hey, that's a nice bonus.

Maybe the Marlins are just that strapped financially, even though they basically had a new stadium built for them. Maybe they just woke up one day and realized that every single thing they had done the previous season was monumentally stupid, and they wanted to start over as quickly as possible. Maybe ... well, in the end, the reasons don’t matter a lot. The Marlins gave up on the baseball fans of Miami. Not for the first time.

And so, on Twitter just after word of the trade broke, I asked this question: Why would anybody go to a single Marlins game in 2013? 

Fortunately, several brilliant readers had ideas on that: