VIERA, Fla. -- We may not have known much this winter about the Florida Marlins' murky future. But at least we knew this:

Sometime in the middle of February, they were going to start playing something that looked a lot like baseball.

	Cliff Floyd's plan for spring training would have been a big hit with teammates.

Granted, you couldn't be sure they were going to have a manager at the time. Or a general manager. Or a coaching staff. And you couldn't be sure exactly which locale in the hospitable state of Florida they were going to be playing in.

But details, schmetails. Details like these are vastly overrated.

"The way I looked at it," said first baseman Kevin Millar, "did it really matter if they named a manager on Dec. 20, or Jan. 10, or Feb. 14? All I knew was, we were going to play baseball. Who's our manager? I don't know. But does it matter? Why? We're not playing tomorrow."

So a few weeks ago, as the prospect of beginning spring training without a manager or coaches was straddling that line between laughable and feasible, Millar and his buddy, Cliff Floyd, decided they were ready to take charge.

If the players were going to have to run spring training themselves, then what the heck. They would. They could. And if their spring training resembled no spring training anyone had ever witnessed, hey, it wasn't their fault.

What kind of spring training would they have designed? Glad you asked, because Floyd has revealed exclusively to ESPN.com the spring schedule he had planned.

"Basically," Floyd chuckled, "everyone would get here about 11 . . . and tee time's about 12:30."

And what would they have done in that grueling hour and a half between? Well, let's just say it wouldn't exactly have looked like Vince Lombardi's two-a-days.

"Get here about 11, stretch on your own," Floyd said. "No hitters would have to take live BP off our pitchers. That's a no-no. These guys are too nasty. And no PFP (pitchers' fielding drills) for the pitchers, because two years in a row, A.J. Burnett got hurt doing PFP's. So basically, it would have been BP for as long as you want it, then condition on your own, then tee time."

It never came to that, of course. And we're still not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But now that we can look in retrospect at the Marlins' long offseason nightmare, that spring-training version of People's Court would have been a fitting conclusion.

"Before this, I really thought I'd seen it all," said Floyd, the last Marlins position player remaining from the '97 World Series champs. "But now I really have. It was weird, man. I never had a situation before where the people I was talking to in October were gone in December.

"In December, Al Avila was our acting general manager, with John Westhof and Scott Reid. And then all of a sudden, I was asking, 'Who do I call to ask what's going on?' -- because those guys all disappeared, too."

In the end, this turned into the greatest disappearing act since Amelia Earhart. Ultimately, about the only people who didn't disappear from the Florida Marlins, as they existed last October, were the players -- with just a handful of exceptions.

The old traveling secretary, Bill Beck, still hands out meal money. Tony Perez and Andre Dawson are still on the payroll as special assistants to the general manager. Three clubhouse assistants, some of the p.r. staff and a couple of scouts remain. And everyone else? Scattered across the baseball landscape like human confetti.

No one paid much attention to the Marlins' tragicomedy this winter. But by the time spring training rolled around, the true victims of contraction weren't the staffs of the Twins and Expos. It was all those fired Marlins employees who felt the real pain.

"Those people are the sad part of this," Millar said. "All those people behind the scenes, those are the people I felt for."

Other baseball men have used stronger words to describe their friends who are now out of work -- words such as "disgraceful" and "appalling." But like so many other developments in this bizarre offseason, the Marlins' off-the-field pain has been masked by the comforting sight of men in teal hats playing baseball again.

As free-agent outfielder Mark Smith put it, "I've never been happier to be taking swings and running around the field."

Smith is a perfect microcosm of this team's crazy winter. He actually signed with the Expos in December -- back when he wasn't sure the team he was signing with would even exist. But he and agent Arn Tellem also negotiated a clause in his contract that stipulated that if Expos manager Jeff Torborg departed, Smith could opt out of the deal.

That's exactly what happened, obviously. So just hours before spring training began, Smith backed out of his Expos contract and followed Torborg to Florida.

"I just wanted to play for people I was comfortable with," he said.

	“	I'd be lying if I said I knew all these guys by sight. We did play them 19 times last year, so I know most of the guys on the major-league club. But would I say I know them all? No, not yet. ”
		— Larry Beinfest, Marlins GM

This camp is full of ironies just like that. A few weeks ago, early spring arrivals watched their former trainer, Larry Starr, and former equipment manager, Mike Wallace, arrive from Miami to set up the training room and unload the spring-training gear. Then they U-turned back down I-95 to take the same jobs with the Expos.

Up in the general manager's office these days sits Larry Beinfest. Until two weeks ago, he was the general manager of the Expos.

So he spent his winter getting the Expos ready for spring training, even preparing arbitration cases that another GM, Omar Minaya, wound up inheriting. Meanwhile, Beinfest is now trying to negotiate the contracts of a dozen young Marlins players -- some of whom he hasn't even met yet.

"I'd be lying if I said I knew all these guys by sight," Beinfest confessed. "We did play them 19 times last year, so I know most of the guys on the major-league club. But would I say I know them all? No, not yet."

Hey, it's that kind of scene. The front office doesn't know its own players. The players don't know their own bosses. You couldn't make this stuff up.

"I walked around for two days calling everyone 'Big Daddy,'" Millar said. "Somebody'd say hello, I'd say, 'Hey, Big Daddy.' I didn't know anybody's name, so they were all Big Daddy."

At least he wasn't the only one mixed up. Take the manager. Here's how confusing Jeff Torborg's life has been:

So far this month, he has held a mortgage or a lease on four different residences in the state of Florida -- his home in Sarasota, an apartment near the Expos' spring home in Jupiter, an apartment near the Marlins' camp which later was taken off the rental market by the landlord, and the apartment he wound up renting in Cape Canaveral.

But it could have been worse. Had Loria's two-headed sale-purchase transaction in Montreal and Florida not closed when it did this month, Torborg could have started the spring managing the Expos and ended it managing the Marlins.

	“	My best line, when people asked me what I thought would happen, was that I'd see them in Montreal opening day. And they'd say, 'So you're going to still be managing the Expos?' And I'd say, 'No, the Marlins are going to Montreal opening day, so I'll be there, one way or another. ”
		— Jeff Torborg, Marlins manager

"The tough part," Torborg said, "is that all winter, I couldn't really talk to the players on either team. I only talked to one Expos player the whole offseason, Jose Vidro. He called and asked what's going on? And I told him the truth. I had no idea. And obviously, I couldn't call these players here because I wasn't the manager here.

"So my best line, when people asked me what I thought would happen, was that I'd see them in Montreal opening day. And they'd say, 'So you're going to still be managing the Expos?' And I'd say, 'No, the Marlins are going to Montreal opening day, so I'll be there, one way or another.'"

But Torborg had a feeling which club he'd end up with. So he spent the winter poring over scouting reports and his files from his broadcasting days. And when he walked through the doors of Space Coast Stadium, he was ready.

Last Thursday, he gathered his coaching staff and his players around him before the first full workout of the spring. And when he began to speak, the insanity of the winter they'd all left behind began to melt into insignificance.

"I'll tell you, he was very inspiring," Floyd said. "Most of the time, you have these meetings, and it's routine, the same old thing. This one actually pumped me up. I was paying attention, looking him right in the eye -- because what he was saying was the perfect thing for our team."

The message Torborg preached was: "You guys don't know how good you are, how good you looked from the other side of the field." But he also told them he believed baseball teams are families, that whatever they did, he wanted them to do it together.

"He said, 'We're going to do this together, and we all have to believe in it,' " Floyd said. "In the past, we believed in it for a while -- till we lost a couple of games. Them boom. There it goes."

Last year, it all went in the final 85 games, starting with a five-game sweep by the Phillies in late June. The Marlins were five games over .500 and two games out of first place when that series started. They went 35-50 the rest of the way.

But now they get to start over in more ways than one. And that makes them a very dangerous team in a division where almost no one seems to notice anyone is playing except the Braves and Mets.

If you just look at life off the field, this could be this team's worst year ever. (The Marlins had somehow sold fewer season tickets than the Expos at last look.) But their best hope for saving the franchise is on the field, where Ryan Dempster, A.J. Burnett, Brad Penny, Matt Clement and megaprospect Josh Beckett are still the Rotation No One Wants to Face.

"I heard it over and over last year," Floyd said, "from the superstars of the league -- from Sheffield, from Piazza. They'd say, 'We dread coming to town. We don't want to face those guys.' And I don't blame them. I don't want to face them now, in BP. It's horrible."

We've often heard that there's almost nothing in baseball that a bunch of men throwing baseballs 95 miles an hour can't cure. And the Florida Marlins may be about to prove that, after one of the strangest offseasons in baseball history.

"It was a weird winter," said Cliff Floyd. "But you know what? I feel like, if we can handle this, we can handle anything."

Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.