When a team has had four owners in its history and the most committed and consistently dedicated to winning was Jeffrey Loria, you’ve got bigger problems than you realize.
That is the current situation with the Marlins.
Admittedly, the club’s ownership history is pockmarked. Wayne Huizenga built a World Series winner within five years of the club coming into existence and blew it up immediately after that World Series. Huizenga is the same guy who, as Dolphins owner, told Jimmy Johnson that there’s “no money in sports.”
John Henry owned the team for a blink and, with Major League Baseball’s shady help, traded up to buy Red Sox while passing the club along to Loria. Loria won a World Series in 2003. His teams were up and down; he fired and rehired managers like a mini-George Steinberenner; he surrounded himself with sycophants; he pocketed revenue sharing cash; and he at least tried to win here and there. He succeeded in getting the new ballpark built, festooned with gauche art and the gaudiness of a tourist trap Miami nightclub including a collection of star players Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, Giancarlo Stanton and Hanley Ramirez along with a World Series-winning manager in Ozzie Guillen only to detonate it immediately when the team finished in last place.
Then Sherman bought the team, installed Derek Jeter as team president and part owner and set about…doing basically the same dysfunctional things his predecessors did.
The state itself is partially to blame. Florida is not interested in baseball to the degree to make it viable. Even in years where the teams – the Marlins and Rays – have been championship contenders with significant star power, they have never drawn well, almost always finishing at or near the bottom in attendance. The ballparks can’t be blamed for it as the new Marlins stadium has every amenity imaginable and people still don’t go.
Now, the team is again in turmoil and the park will be empty except for when transplants to the state who are fans of other teams make the trek.
After Tuesday night’s loss to the Yankees, the Marlins are 1-11. They sit seven games behind the first place Braves in the National League East and 5.5 games out of a Wild Card spot.
It’s April 10th.
Sherman is under siege from the national media. Other teams are waiting for their chance to beat on his beleaguered club while scrutinizing their roster to see who they want when the inevitable housecleaning begins and all veterans are traded off to boost a flagging farm system. Reigning Manager of the Year Skip Schumaker and the club agreed to void his 2025 contract option, all but guaranteeing he’ll be managing elsewhere (the Cardinals) next year.
Whoever the new manager is, they’re well-advised to not win Manager of the Year. In Miami, it’s been a death knell for every manager who’s won it.
Joe Girardi won it after Loria had fired him.
Don Mattingly won it in 2020 and lasted two more before he and the club mutually agreed to part ways.
Schumaker will be out after 2024 no matter what happens.
All told, there’s reason to be outraged.
Still, the decisions are grudgingly explainable.
The optics are undeniably atrocious. Discounting the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the 2023 Marlins made the playoffs for the first time in two decades. They did so under the stewardship of the dual ceiling-breaker, general manager Kim Ng, who was not only the first female GM but the first Asian-American GM in North American sports history.
Buster Olney tweeted the following after the Marlins lost their first seven games:
Technically, of course this is accurate. It is also representative of the faction that neither knows nor cares about the sustainability of the Marlins’ fluky playoff appearance in 2023. Olney understands this. Fans? Some do. Some don’t. Some are looking at it from the perspective of how Bendix plans to run the club based on his past with the Rays. Others are angry at what Bendix plans to do and that the numbers will take precedence to a far greater degree than they would have under Jeter and Ng.
But is Sherman wrong? On the surface, the detractors say the Marlins did it with a limited payroll and a patched-together roster under a female, Asian-American GM and think the team should simply have stayed the course regardless of whether that course was wise or repeatable.
A playoff appearance at 84-78 in which they were bounced in two straight games by the Phillies when they were last in the National League in runs scored, tenth in on-base percentage, tenth in ERA, 13th in stolen bases and 14th in fielding percentage is not going to happen regularly, if at all.
Farm system rankings are arbitrary, but every relatively reputable voice labels the Marlins’ system as one of baseball’s worst. Overall, they are not good. They weren’t very good in 2023. So what was Sherman supposed to do? He had discarded all of Jeter’s people and Ng was a Jeter hire. For all the justifiable anger at the team’s horrific start, refusing to throw more money into the thresher is not indicative of being cheap in this case. It’s indicative of knowing the facts. 2023 was not the culmination of four or five years of work as the team took its next step into the upper levels of MLB. Objectively, it was a freak occurrence.
Could they realistically have made a few more signings or acquisitions and risen from 84 wins to 90?
Forget the top tier of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Aaron Nola or Josh Hader. They didn’t have the goods to trade for Juan Soto. They weren’t even reasonable options for the next level free agents Cody Bellinger, Matt Chapman or Sonny Gray. They did not even make a cursory effort to retain Jorge Soler.
Where were the improvements coming from?
After restructuring the team’s operations and rebuilding the farm system, Jeter expected there to be financial flexibility to make drastic improvements to the big league roster. They were not fulfilled and he left. With Jeter gone, Ng’s fate was sealed no matter what happened on the field and that was proven when Sherman decided to hire a president of baseball operations to be her boss. Essentially, she was fired because there was no way she was going to accept that power structure in which she had none of the power. For her, being an underling just happy to be invited to the party ended 15 years ago. It’s beneath her. She declined the mutual option in which she would have been a lame duck and undoubtedly discarded after 2024 had she stayed. That’s what Sherman wanted.
Bendix arrived with the sabermetric pedigree and the 15 years of working for the Rays. He is not looking at it from a player’s perspective as Jeter was. Nor did he claw his way up from the very bottom after 30 years of toil in various roles as Ng did.
Sherman was looking for someone who might be able to achieve success under the mandated payroll constraints and found that in Bendix. The Jeter faction is a memory. Given the financial realities the owner put in place and are legitimate based on their market, you can unload on them because they’re clearly tanking, but you cannot say they’re wrong to do it when considering the circumstances.
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