Feels like we’ve hit the unannounced late-winter baseball doldrums: The novelty of Spring Training has ebbed, leaving a picked-over tray of tragic injury reports, scattered book-length box scores and fake-game highlights to keep us properly undernourished and ever eager for regular season play. Beat reporters have turned toward the excruciatingly quotidian task of profiling quad-A training camp invitees; bloggers have resolved, apparently, to analyze everything Kris Bryant and Mookie Betts have done since presumably brushing their teeth this morning. Fantasy players keep themselves up well past midnight, tinkering with overwrought draft lists and wondering, still, whether anyone cares.
Yes, anticipatory fever lingers at the periphery, provided no clear outlet into reality just yet. We’re still a few weeks out from being able to watch any semblance of meaningful baseball, and so our natural tendency is to talk about it enough that it seems real. Or, paradoxically, so that it seems real enough to talk about: to politely indulge in our private pleasures while simultaneously justifying that selfsame indulgence. Provided sufficient insularity, this sort of feedback loop seems almost utopian in its ideal simplicity. Set the parameters to exclude anyone who isn’t obsessively or excessively interested in baseball, and you’ve got the rudiments of a perpetual-motion scheme here.
Trouble is, this stuff has never existed in a vacuum; never will. The world spins on, perfectly indifferent to the epochal joys and sorrows of a young man’s fancy lightly turned toward baseball. It is with great difficulty— and then, often, only in tormented admission of psychic defeat, or desperately willful intellectual disengagement— that the modern reader can breeze through headlines born of unending religious and resource wars, global poverty, corporate exploitation, human trafficking and environmental disaster, in order to better dedicate time toward studying team transactions and injury updates. Baseball is, after all, a pastime: a diversion elevated unto an obsession; a beautiful, arcane, polymorphous fountain of metaphor and human endeavor; but, nonetheless, merely a very colorfully adorned cocktail waitress at life’s rich pageant.
And so in this spirit of morbid contextualization, we offer our own meaningless contribution to the preseason literature: an analysis itself so rife with paradox and contradiction as to render itself absurdly useless, and, simultaneously, absurdly invaluable. Presented here (in serialized capsule format, of course), are an assortment of insights on a handful of baseball’s more historically challenged teams, taking into account such radically disparate factors as projected lineups, pitching rotations, bullpens, benches, and minor league depth; coaching and front-office philosophy and pathology; historical, social and economic contexts; and whatever multi-, inter-, cross- or post-disciplinary bullshit fits the bill. We’ll also rehash the traditional narratives associated with these clubs, and offer some alternatives for those of you growing tired with sports journalists’ inbred tendency to repeat one another ad infinitum.
[Obligatory source notes: Historical data from Baseball-Reference; projected Win-Loss totals from Fangraphs; projected 2015 Opening Day salaries from Cot’s Contracts; payroll figures based on (projected) Opening Day rosters; attendance is average per game; all rankings are MLB-wide]
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Miami Marlins
2014 Record: 77-85 (T-18th); 2014 Payroll: $42.4M (30th); Attendance: 21,386 (27th)
2015 Projection: 81-81 (T-15th); 2015 Payroll $60.4M (30th)
Conventional wisdom holds that the Marlins serve primarily as the bejewled plaything of nefarious, meddlesome millionaire Jeffrey Loria. Their secondary function, aligned closely with the first, is to divert Miami-Dade County residents’ attention from the $2.4 Billion they’ll be shelling out (through 2049) to finance the construction and maintenance of Marlins Park. Given Loria’s track record both in (see: 2000-02 Montreal Expos; 2012-13 Marlins) and outside of (namely: profiting from the sale of collectable modern art to wealthy Manhattanites) the game, it’s not difficult to buy into this narrative. Throw in the persona of team president and erstwhile reality-TV contestant David Samson, and you’re ready to run screaming and puking into the warm dark night.
Luckily, the view into reality from their shiny new orange grandstand is obscured by enough flash and filigree to befuddle a sage. Although the modest bump in salary for this year’s team seems about par for the course, it doesn’t account for an additional $15.5 million that will be paid by the exceedingly wealthy New York and Los Angeles clubs. Ever adept at exploiting the psychological insecurities surrounding any big financial deal, Loria, the inveterate art broker, and Samson, his eager corporate bulldog, have engineered a 2015 payroll subsidy of nearly 20%. What cunning! What brave men, and such wise leaders!
Since a satisfying off-field narrative may be verily impossible to cultivate here, let us focus our attentions between the white lines. Buzz around the Marlins’ actual ballclub is centered largely on their talented young outfield of Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna and Giancarlo Stanton. Sportswriterly crotches stiffen and throb over the array of superlatives available to lavish upon these strapping young men. With any luck, we’ll be desperate for new turns of praise into August and September, rather than merely bemoaning the inevitable rash of injuries that will have derailed the rest of this team’s otherwise paper-thin lineup. Optimistically: it’s possible Michael Morse provides his brutal brand of right-handed thump for more than half the season; it’s also possible Dee Gordon repeats his career year on the basepaths, improving nicely on a career .314 OBP; it’s even possible that carrying a certain all-world 41-year old utility outfielder isn’t merely a publicity stunt!
But these are the sorts of leaps of faith that those around Loria are by now wary of making. To eschew enthusiasm and optimism, in service of not being fooled again: this is the ethos of the corporate-hijacked baseball fan. Battle-scarred, ripped-off, driven by craven economic lords and quisling middlemen to the wracked shores of cynicism and feigned indifference, Marlins fans know better than to believe the hype. In order to bolster their roster without spending too freely this offseason, the Marlins parted with a trio of promising young pitchers: Nathan Eovaldi, Anthony DeSclafani, and Andrew Heaney. It is through the lens of these specific transactions that the scope and shamelessness of the Marlins’ engineered futility becomes fully apparent.
Eovaldi, the only one of the three with significant Major League experience, was dealt to the Yankees (along with a low-A pitching prospect and what was left of fair-to-middlin’ cornerman Garrett Jones) for Martin Prado, David Phelps, and $6M. Prado figures to start at third base, and should supply steady if unspectacular production there, or wherever he ends up on the diamond. Incidentally, he’ll be the team’s highest-paid player this season, at $11M (of which Miami is on the hook for $8M), and is under contract next year. Whether two years of Prado can compensate for the drop-off from Eovaldi to Phelps is, at best, debatable. Eovaldi, a high-upside 25-year old flamethrower, seems primed for a breakout very soon; Phelps, a low-ceiling 28-year old swingman, seems primed to be one of those dudes who ends up eating a bunch of innings for the Twins. Either the Fish are banking on a UCL disaster with Eovaldi, or there are other components at play here. Incidentally, Phelps lost his arbitration hearing, and will earn less than half of Eovaldi’s salary this season. Over the next three or four seasons, he represents something like a $15-20M discount over the obviously more entertaining, and likely more dominant, pitcher now working for the Steinbrenners.
DeSclafani came to Miami in the blockbuster trade with Toronto, and quickly impressed with a strong campaign in AA, earning the organization’s 2013 Minor League Pitcher of the Year honors. He debuted in the majors last year and made a handful of starts, with decidedly mixed results; the jury remains out on his ability to handle big league batters with a limited array of offerings. This offseason, he was traded (along with a low-A prospect) to Cincinnati for one year of Mat Latos. On paper, this could represent significant short-term upside for Miami, as Latos projects for nearly 200 innings of solid starting pitching this season. As announcers will no doubt remind us every five days for the next few months, he also provides the proverbial veteran leadership for Miami’s young flamethrowers. Of course, we should point out that his recent injury history and apparent loss of velocity are generally clear signals of a pitcher’s imminent decline. Nonetheless, the Marlins have pushed a significant pile of chips in on this one, sacrificing six years of team control over DeSclafani for one season of stability. Long-term? The $9.4M Latos pulls down before hitting free agency this fall is a massive bargain compared to what a successful DeSclafani would be earning by his walk year of 2020.
Of the three trades, it’s the one with L.A. that hurt the Marlins’ credibility the most. First of all, anyone freely willing to engage an operator as shrewd and resourceful as Dodgers’ GM Andrew Friedman must be either desperate or deluded. Beyond that, targeting an otherwise forgettable second baseman who just led the league in stolen bases and triples reeks of poor planning. The Marlins definitively bought high on Dee Gordon, and are hoping he’ll serve as the prototypical leadoff/sparkplug guy they’ve been missing since Juan Pierre departed (the first time). What they end up with is anyone’s guess, but the price they paid was huge: two MLB-ready bench/bullpen pieces, a Double-A catching prospect, and 23 year-old starting pitcher Andrew Heaney.
Heaney was the 9th overall pick in the 2012 draft, and was the Marlins’ top prospect heading into this offseason. He had breezed through three levels of pro ball last season, and debuted with the Marlins in June. Big things are expected of the young southpaw, and thanks to Loria’s fanboy fondness for speed at the top of the order, Heaney will be accomplishing those big things in Los Angeles. (Actually, Anaheim; he was flipped by the Dodgers immediately for Howie Kendrick, who represents a massive upgrade over Gordon at the keystone.) South Florida, in the meantime, will have to distract itself with the flash and fumbling of Dee Gordon’s not-ready-for-prime-time 77% stolen base success rate.
Without delving into the expected future values of the various other players involved in these trades (or the absurdity of an obviously reluctant Dan Haren lending some semblance of straw-man legitimacy to the Heaney-for-Gordon swap), the Marlins here have traded fifteen years of young, cost-controlled, high-upside starting pitching for: two years of Prado; one year of Latos; some sort of appearance by Haren; and four years of Gordon and Phelps. This isn’t just ugly on paper; it’s going to play out poorly on the field, too. Even if one of the three departed pitchers implodes, this would still go down as one of the more lopsided transactional arrays in Marlins history. Which is, yes, saying something.
Jeff Loria wants to remind his fans to please focus their attention on the hulking titans crushing dingers out of the three- through five-holes, and wow!, would you just look at that ninja zipping around to score from first on an outfield single! Did we mention the shiny, twinkling kinetic apparatus beyond the outfield wall? Zoom! Zap! Zing!
I'll take the under on that optimistic Fangraphs projection. If a few things (Morse; Stanton; someone else's UCL) fall apart before July, it wouldn't surprise me to see Latos, Haren, Ichiro and closer Steve Cishek playing for contenders by September.
