In popularity poll, Miami Marlins’ Jeffrey Loria ekes out a win over Fidel Castro

This is where the Godwinshares Law comes in handy.

They vented on sports talk radio, threatened to cancel their season tickets, and wrote angry letters to the editor. But they’re not over it yet. Marlins fans are still furious at team owner Jeffrey Loria more than a week after he traded five players and purged his payroll of $160 million in a controversial trade with the Toronto Blue Jays.

And the backlash isn’t coming from just a few loud diehards.

A survey of 400 South Florida Major League Baseball fans, 90 percent of them self-described Marlins fans, found that the Marlins organization — Loria, in particular — antagonized and may have permanently alienated a majority of the fan base.

Only 23 of the respondents (6 percent) had a “favorable’’ opinion of Loria, and a third of those were people who said they personally know him. The only public figure who might lose a popularity contest to Loria in South Florida right now is Fidel Castro (who has a favorability rating of rating of about 1 percent, says pollster Fernand Amandi).