Offishial News, 1/23/24: What's your confidence level at?

🔹 Leading off, I just want to thank everybody who became a SuperSub on Monday. Even with some users dealing with technical difficulties, we set a new single-day record for sign-ups! You can join them here.

🔹 Monday's winter ball notes: In the Dominican Republic, RF Vidal Bruján went 2-for-4 with a walk and a caught stealing.

🔹 The Marlins Fan Confidence Poll is going to be a new monthly tradition around here. On a 1-10 scale, tell us how you feel about the direction of the franchise. I'll be tracking the ebbs and flows of the mean and median poll results.

🔹 Elsewhere around baseball, Aroldis Chapman (1/$10.5M) signed with the Pirates and James Paxton (1/~$12M) is close to finalizing a deal with the Dodgers.

🔹 In the second part of an interview with MLB.com's Christina De Nicola, Peter Bendix emphasized the importance of "getting a buy-in from the player" when trying to change something about their game. "You might have the best idea in the world, [but] if you can't both communicate that to the player and get his buy-in, that idea doesn't matter," Bendix says. He also describes baseball operations success as "entering as many seasons as we can with legitimate playoff aspirations, playing meaningful, exciting games in September."

🔹 Laura Georgia explores Ryan Weathers' baseball background and comes away optimistic that he has the intangibles to cope with his past MLB struggles and perform better than ever in 2024.

🔹 The results of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America Hall of Fame election will be revealed tonight at 6 p.m. ET on MLB Network. There are five candidates (Adrián Beltré, Joe Mauer, Todd Helton, Billy Wagner and Gary Sheffield) who've received at least 75.0% of the vote on the 200 publicly known BBWAA ballots. I'll lean pessimistic and predict that only Beltré and Helton get elected this year.

🔹 Fish On First's Noah Berger created a new "media" Twitter account (@NoahBergerMedia) to separate his Marlins reporting from his personal life. Please follow him there.

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