Ever since their debut season in 1993, part of Major League Baseball’s two-team expansion that winter, the Marlins have been one of the weirdest teams in baseball. They’ve had very little success to speak of in terms of competitive seasons, but two of the times they were actually able to put together solid rosters, they ended up winning the whole thing (1997, 2003). Then, they went ahead and sold everything off, and started over. Unfortunately for them, that wildly unsustainable (and stupid) strategy turned out to be wildly unsustainable (and stupid) and as a result, it’s been over twenty years since they’ve built anything close to a real contender. At least until 2023… kinda.
Where were they in 2023?
Coming into 2023, Miami had a roster that looked incomplete, though with some interesting names. If you squinted just right, you could see Sandy Alcantara and Jesus Luzardo holding down the fort in a decent rotation and Jorge Soler and Luis Arraez at least keeping things competitive offensively. They were projected for 80 wins and playoff odds around 1-in-4, which isn’t great, but it’s something in our new, expanded playoffs era.
The irony of the Marlins’ 2023 season is, if I told you Alcantara was going to have his worst season since becoming a full-time starter, that would eventually lead to Tommy John Surgery, and I told you their position player group would finish the year ranked 26th in baseball in fWAR, what would you guess their record to be? Probably not 84-78 and a playoff team, but that’s exactly where they ended up.
The rest of their pitching staff stepped up, posting the eighth-best FIP in baseball and the 2023 Marlins had some of the best 1-run game luck you’ll ever see over a full season. Overall Miami had a -57 run differential last year, good for an expected record of 75-87. They beat that total by nine wins by finishing an astounding 32-13 in one runs games, the second-best one-run game record in the Wild Card era. They rode that good fortune (including finishing with seven wins over their BaseRuns record) all the way to final Wild Card spot in the National League before being summarily eliminated in the Wild Card round.
It’s fairly rare to see a team competitive while finishing in the bottom five in position player production, but their eighth-ranked pitching staff was up to the task. Luzardo was great, Braxton Garrett and Alcantara (before his injury) were at least solid, Tanner Scott had one of those random reliever breakout seasons and was the best reliever, by fWAR, in all of MLB. Edward Cabrera and Eury Perez were far from chopped liver, too, while a bunch of other relief arms had good seasons as well (Dylan Floro, A.J. Puk, Andrew Nardi). Position player-wise, things were a lot murkier, with only Arraez having a notably above-average season. The Marlins gave a combined 1,249 PAs to a quartet of Yuli Gurriel, Jacob Stallings, Joey Wendle, and Jean Segura, who combined for -3.4 fWAR. Yikes.
The wide variability in performance, and the reliance on winning a bunch of one-run games, meant that it was a roller coaster season in Miami, at least in relation to the standings. After losing their first game in June, they then reeled off a 13-3 run, after which they had the NL’s third-best record. By June 29, they had the second-best record in the NL… and then they were promptly swept by the Braves and went 9-15 in July, and then 10-17 in August. On August 30, they were coming off a stretch in which they hadn’t scored over four runs in ten games, and four runs just once, and went 2-8 in the process, dropping them to 66-67 and three games out of a playoff spot. It was only thanks to an 18-11 finish to the season that they were able to make the postseason.
What did they do in the offseason?
Miami’s off-season started off with a bit of a shocker, as the team announced General Manager Kim Ng would not be returning to her post in 2024, despite 2023’s unexpected playoff run. Reportedly, there were disagreements over the direction of things going forward, and Ng felt she had earned more power in her role than apparently the team was willing to give. She was replaced by Peter Bendix, who took over as President of Baseball Operations after spending 15 years with the Tampa Bay Rays.
On the field, Miami’s off-season started with 1B/DH Josh Bell exercising his $16 million player option for the 2024 season. Bell and left fielder Jake Burger were the Marlins’ big moves at last year’s Trade Deadline and both are returning for 2024. They’ll need both to continue contributing offensively after the Marlins didn’t bring back 2023 contributor Jorge Soler. After that, it was pretty quiet from Miami, a familiar tune for that fanbase, such as it is. The Marlins did complete a trade with Tampa for second baseman Vidal Brujan for a collection of minor leaguers, but other than that, the team mostly stood pat this winter. They signed shorstop Tim Anderson to a one-year, $5 million contract, hoping for a bounce back year after a disastrous 2023 season.
The black cloud currently hanging over the team is whether will they actually pony up the funds to keep All-Star Luis Arraez around past 2025. If they don’t, well, that’ll be another familiar tune for the fanbase.
Where are they hoping to go?
This is always a tough question for Miami. Usually their primary focus is cutting payroll and raking in the revenue sharing dough, all while pretending to care about contending. The fact that they are coming off a playoff season, and yet arguably their two biggest storylines this offseason are the people who didn’t come back (Ng and Soler) probably tells you all you need to know about the baseball club in Miami.
Sure, they’ll tell you they hope to contend and build on last year’s impressive, though mostly lucky, season. But the truth is they’ll sell off anything valuable at the first sign of trouble, tell their fans they’re “re-tooling” and start all over again. They’ve been doing it for three decades now, so it’s not hard to predict. The fact is, without that insane one-run game record, this is closer to a bottom-half of the league team vs a top-half of the league team.
Put all of that together, and well, the Marlins are in the same place heading into 2024 as they were in 2023 — a central estimate of around 81 wins, playoff odds somewhere between 25 and 30 percent, and a bottom ten roster. There’s a serious lack of top-end talent on the roster, and they have massive question marks and/or holes at shortstop, the corner outfield (Bryan de la Cruz and Jesus Sanchez have combined for 4.1 career fWAR in 2,225 PAs, a rate just over 1 fWAR/600, but seem to be entrenched in their spots), and whatever they’re going to do at DH. They’re going to be leaning on their rotation very heavily to make up for the shortcomings on the position player side, but it just doesn’t seem like enough to have an admittedly deep and strong starting pitching unit when almost all of the rest of your roster is so meh-to-awful.
Braves head-to-head
Atlanta dominated the head-to-head series against Miami, going 9-4 in the 13 games between the two. It was actually even worse than that, the Braves were 9-1 against them in the first 10 games and then Miami had the good fortune of being the team the Braves played immediately after clinching the division. The champagne hangover series ended up in a three-game sweep for Miami, brining the season record to 9-4 in favor of Atlanta.
In 2024, the Braves and Marlins will again play 13 times, as is customary for division opponents, over four different series. The first two are three-game series, April 12-14 in Miami, and then a week later, April 22-24 in Atlanta. The third isn’t until the first week of August, a four-game series in Atlanta, August 1-4, and then the final series is a three-game series in Miami, September 20-22.
