The gravity of regular-season baseball has pulled the Miami Marlins to the ground even faster than it did three years ago.
The current season has followed an off-season that featured the most hype about the team since the off-season heading into the opening of the new stadium and re-branding of the team in 2012. Before that season, Miami splurged to bring in Mark Buehrle, José Reyes and Heath Bell to inflate that buzz even more.
Since the end of the 2014 regular season, the Marlins have signed Michael Morse and Ichiro Suzuki along with trading for Dee Gordon, Dan Haren, Mat Latos, Martín Prado and David Phelps. All those acquisitions were supposed to augment the young core and produce a team that at worst was a serious wild card contender in the National League.
Just 13 games into this season, it’s all dashed on the rocks. Even Humpty Dumpty took longer to meet the ground and shatter in his famous descent. The similarities between the 2012 and 2015 trials are numerous.
There are the infielders who were acquired to add speed to the lineup and set the table (2012: Reyes, 2015: Gordon) and the veteran soft-tossers with a trunk full of wins on their resumés (2012: Buehrle, 2015: Haren). The flavor of the Fish even has the same hint of Atlanta Braves cast-off to it (2012: Omar Infante, 2015: Prado).
In 2012, the Marlins got a paltry .192/.297/.347 with 41 runs batted in from their every day catcher, John Buck. At the time, Buck was into his second year with Miami after signing with the team as a free agent. He was also that same amount of time removed from his only All-Star appearance, in which he slashed .281/.314/.489 and drove in 66.
So far Jarrod Saltalamacchia is producing even less for the 2015 Marlins. Saltalamacchia’s slash line is a putrid .080/.179/.240 and he has been benched in favor of J.T. Realmuto, who is only up with the major-league club because backup catcher Jeff Mathis is on the disabled list. Like Buck, Saltalamacchia is in his second season with Miami after joining as a free agent, cashing in on arguably the best season of his career.
The results in 2012 actually may have been a little better. In 2012, the Marlins were 7-6 through 13 games. This season’s first 13 games have wrought a 3-10 mark. If you project that same winning percentage out over 162 games, you get what would be a new major-league-record worst of 38-124. Miami went 69-93 in 2012.
The Marlins currently rank 20th in runs scored per game and 26th in runs allowed per game. They come in at 27th in both strikeouts suffered by their batters and strikeouts issued by their pitchers. The pitching staff has issued more walks than all but six other teams and among earned runs allowed, Miami’s hurlers are dead last in baseball.
To further demonstrate the speed and intensity of this destruction, the buzz from and around the team is presented. The lineup’s only hold-over from that 2012 season, right fielder Giancarlo Stanton, had this to say after last Friday night’s loss to the New York Mets.
“We’re not giving ourselves a chance, it feels like. We’ve got a positive vibe, but [something] is just not there. The fire is not there, it seems like. You always want to leave it. But you’re out there, and it’s game time, it’s just nothing there, it seems like.”
A report surfaced last night, after the Marlins were swept in New York in a four-game series with the Mets for the first time in franchise history. The report in the Miami Herald stated that manager Mike Redmond‘s job was one of the pieces that are simply going to be thrown out.
In the article, Clark Spencer correctly points out that owner Jeffrey Loria is unafraid to change managers during a season and has no qualms about a manager’s contract when it comes to firing him. The sentiment is that if Miami doesn’t at least win this upcoming three-game road series against the Philadelphia Phillies, Redmond could be out in favor of the Mets’ Triple-A manager Wally Backman.
Backman has had success at the Triple-A level and seems to be removed from the legal troubles that got him fired from his last major-league skipper gig. Firing Redmond and replacing him with whoever Loria chooses isn’t all that needs to happen to put the pieces back together again, though.
Redmond or any replacement can only manage the roster that Mike Hill and the rest of the braintrust give them to work with. Outside of Gordon, the lineup isn’t producing. The bullpen is overworked and leaking runs because of short, ineffective starts. The returns of Henderson Álvarez and eventually José Fernandez should help that, but by that time it may be too late.
Eventually the front office will have to face that they guessed wrong again. Just like in 2012, the Marlins’ brass will be forced to admit that the roster as currently composed isn’t a winner and they will have to deconstruct it. The process of climbing the wall, trading off current players for prospects and developing them, will start all over.
All of King Loria’s horses and men have proven themselves unable to put a winner together again.
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