The snowball got moving quickly.
This season started with promise for the Miami Marlins a year after they improved by 15 games from 2013 to 2014. There was again hope for baseball in South Florida. Ace Jose Fernandez would eventually return from Tommy John surgery, and slugger Giancarlo Stanton was fully recovered from taking a fastball to the face near the end of last season.
Hope faded quickly, though. The Marlins were swept out of the gate by a downgraded Atlanta Braves team and eventually lost 11 of their first 14 games to fall eight games out of first place two weeks into the season. About a month later, they fired manager Mike Redmond and stunningly replaced him with general manager Dan Jennings, an executive with exactly zero days spent in any professional dugout as a player, coach or manager.
Since then, it’s all just gotten worse, and the soap opera that has come to be associated with the day-to-day operations of the franchise and its owner, Jeffrey Loria, continued right along with storylines involving injured superstars, Loria skipping out on the annual team photo and “sweeping changes to the team’s baseball operations, from player development and scouting, all the way up to the front office,” according to Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald.
Sources: #Marlins fire pro scout Mickey White. Like VP of player personnel Craig Weissman, who was reassigned, White is close with Jennings.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) September 4, 2015
By now, the snowball is a runaway sphere of disappointment, and transforming this team into a contender for 2016 seems not only improbable, but virtually impossible.
Let’s start with the players on the field for this season. Young guys like shortstop Adeiny Hechavarria, left fielder Christian Yelich and center fielder Marcell Ozuna have not progressed the way the organization had hoped. Stanton fractured the hamate bone in his left wrist in late June and hasn’t played since. Fernandez returned to the rotation in July but has been back on the disabled list since Aug. 8 with a biceps strain. And the rotation has been one of the worst in the majors without Fernandez in it.
While Stanton and Fernandez will be back and presumably incredibly productive next season, the team cannot count on those other players or the rest of the current rotation to improve enough to lead them to contention in the National League East, which has a new power team in the New York Mets.
Plus, the Marlins farm system under the watch of Jennings had dropped to near the bottom of the league entering this season, leaving all the talent at lower levels and none from which to pull to improve the major league team in the immediate future. The team has also sold three compensation draft picks in the last three years, including one at this year’s non-waiver trade deadline.
“It’s pretty bad,” ESPN talent evaluator Keith Law told Spencer. “The system right now is not going to fill the short-term needs of the major league club.”
That means Loria, a pincher of pennies on everything from his stadium to his roster, will have to open his bank account to make the Marlins a contender next season, and that will likely include hiring an experienced manager and possibly a GM from the external pool while also paying Jennings through 2018.
Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal reported last week that the Marlins would look to find another front-of-the-rotation kind of starter to slot behind Fernandez, as well as a closer. Because the farm system is so bare, those additions cannot be made through trades.
When Loria has committed to spending money in the recent past, it has always come with caveats and loopholes. When the Marlins spent big prior to the 2012 season to add shortstop Jose Reyes, starter Mark Buehrle, closer Heath Bell and manager Ozzie Guillen, the team started trading assets, or firing them, as soon as the losing commenced. And when Loria signed Stanton to his record 13-year, $325 million contract, it came with an opt out after the sixth season, when Loria will have paid only $107 million of the total, which could be a very team-friendly total by that time.
Loria will have the money to spend in the offseason, but just because he has it—he always has—does not mean he will spend it. If he does, there will be a number of starting pitchers to choose from, but the prices won’t be cheap, and it is very possible the Marlins will need more than just one more starting pitcher to actually contend with the Mets and possibly the Washington Nationals next season.
And now there is a report from Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald stating several players have told “friends, teammates and others” that they are unhappy with the team’s direction and personnel decisions. They’ve also said they believe Loria still prioritizes saving money over winning and that he should sell the team.
Those beliefs don’t stay within a single clubhouse, and this could be a massive hurdle the Marlins are unable to overcome when courting free agents over the winter. Players talk to other players, of course.
The Marlins are a current mess, and contending next season seems as likely as Jennings staying on as manager or the players suddenly adoring Loria. For now, the snowball will keep moving.
All quotes, unless otherwise specified, have been acquired firsthand by Anthony Witrado. Follow Anthony on Twitter @awitrado and talk baseball here.
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