Don’t miss Mike Puma’s text messages from Queens and beyond — he’s giving Sports+ subscribers the inside buzz on the Mets.

The Marlins aren’t a team as much as a baseball laboratory conceived to test-drive a bunch of players and tradition-bucking theories from how to prepare pitchers in between starts to when to play their infield in. 

They also will play 162 games because the rules mandate that. 

The most league-wide vital part of their agenda will not even happen on a field. It is if (when?) they trade ace Sandy Alcantara, who is still rounding into form after missing last season following Tommy John surgery and was not around for a three-game series at Citi Field while on paternity leave. 

In four decades of doing this — not counting COVID games — I had never previously seen a visiting team play in a New York stadium without a print reporter from that city who covers the team regularly in attendance to cover it. Until Wednesday. Which leads to the question: If 110 losses fall in the standings and no one is present to record it, did it happen?