By GREG COTE
Amazing things are swirling around the local baseball franchise.
Miami began to behave like a major-league city by finally approving funding for a new stadium after years of starts, stalls and stops.
The Marlins are looking like a major-league team, shrugging off the dismal predictions of the experts and leading the NL East.
And now, perhaps most amazing of all, the club's parsimonious ownership is stepping up to the major leagues as well, finally opening wide a corporate wallet that must have creaked or emitted dust for sitting so long untouched.
Hanley Ramirez, reportedly getting a lucrative, long-term contract.
And not from another team, from this one!
A franchise with an earned reputation for trading away rather than paying its best young players, finally changing course and doing what grown-up big-league teams do.
It was the kind of news that breaks beautifully, like day breaks with a brilliant peek of sun. Unlike sunrise, however, this was hardly expected.
A chorus of ''Hallelujah!'' is in order and belief in miracles buoyed, for if Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria will commit this kind of dough to the team's future, surely the blind can see and any dream is possible.
Young Hanley, being offered and agreeing to a six-year, $70 million deal. From the Marlins! Seriously!?
Next thing you'll be telling me there's peace in Iraq.
The new contract is not official or announced yet. Even when it becomes so, it does not absolutely guarantee Ramirez will be a career-long Marlin. If anything is possible, that includes a trade at some point.
Nevertheless, this news is strong, tangible evidence of commitment. It is an indication the Marlins plan to be not rebuilding, but fully built, when that new stadium opens with the 2011 season.
More must be done, for sure. Others of the core of this talented young team (Dan Uggla, Mike Jacobs, Scott Olsen et al) must be locked up for the future rather than be dealt before the July 31 trade deadline. (The combination of the Marlins' early playoff contention and the Ramirez deal gives rise to hope the trade deadline might actually see help arriving, rather than key players leaving. That, too, would be amazing.)
Ramirez was the essential starting point. Signing him long-term was the litmus test for this ownership and its claim that the new stadium would be the precursor of expanded payrolls.
Ramirez is the club's biggest and brightest star. He is to the Marlins what Dwyane Wade was to the Heat in 2006, preinjuries, a young bundle of abundant talent that every other team in the sport would kill to have. It is not unreasonable to think Ramirez has a chance to be our biggest star since Dan Marino.
This kid merits such hype, such hope. Even at age 24, to imagine he'll have a place in Cooperstown some day does not seem beyond rational presumption.
He launched with the NL Rookie of the Year award in 2006, soared with 212 hits and 29 homers last season, and presently is batting .336, which for him seems only average. He is a five-tool player, but only because they haven't invented a sixth tool for him to master.
We speak of a player capable of leading the league in batting, swatting 40 homers, winning a Gold Glove and leading the league in stolen bases -- all in the same season. It is why Boston's David ''Big Papi'' Ortiz predicted this spring that Ramirez in a year or two would overtake Alex Rodriguez as the consensus best player in baseball.
I had written a column April 2 under the headline, ''Time for Loria to commit to keeping his best players,'' but never imagined the owner actually would. I doubt many Marlins fans -- scarred by past fire sales and embarrassed by the club's 2008 baseball-low team payroll of $21 million -- had much faith in that, either.
The understandable assumption was that Ramirez would be heading for gone just like the other stars who became too good and too expensive, the most recent being Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis.
This ownership's track record was to let Ramirez go to arbitration after this season and then trade him or lose him to free agency after one more year. Instead, now, there is the real prospect that No. 2 at shortstop will be the cornerstone of this infield, this lineup, this team and franchise, indefinitely.
Loria and company had been bucking the trend of teams signing their young stars to long-term deals. In fact Ramirez's new deal, when finalized, would be the first multiyear contract Florida has given since 2005. It shouldn't be the last.
For now the Ramirez deal should be seen and accepted by Marlins fans as a pretty major goodwill gesture, and the fans in turn must begin to do their part.
The political machine has done its work with the new stadium. The team is winning. Now that ownership is proving a willingness to spend big to lock up its best player, the people who call themselves Marlins fans but don't go to games seem to be running out of good excuses.
The city has committed to the Marlins' long-term future here, and the Ramirez deal is a strong, welcome indication Loria is beginning to.
Now it's the fans' turn.
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