As of a week ago, Ozzie Guillen was enjoying time in Europe with several of the Marlins in his charge. Today, there are no more Marlins in his charge. He has been sacked, despite the three years and $7.5 million remaining on his contract and despite the fact that the Marlins actually traded two players to get him.

If the 2012 Miami Marlins season was The Old Man and the Sea, we’re at the part where the great fish has been reduced to a skeleton and a weepy Giancarlo Stanton is bringing the newspaper to Jose Reyes. Or something.

I started to put together a timeline of things that the Marlins did in the past 12 months — the stadium opening the Clevelander, Guillen praising Fidel Castro, the team acquiring Carlos Lee, etc., etc. — but the task became overwhelming and I grew certain you’d see it elsewhere. It’d be a colorful sequence, for sure, mesmerizing in its ugliness, with so many seemingly incongruous elements operating in smooth communion to create something at once spectacular and alarming.

Which is to say, it’d look something like this: