Should the Marlins bring Nick Martinez home?

While the Marlins are most focused on improving their offense this winter, they should also be open to investing in adding depth to their pitching staff when it makes sense to do so. Former San Diego Padres right-hander Nick Martinez is an intriguing candidate. Martinez became a free agent when his options for the 2024 and 2025 seasons were declined.

The Padres used Martinez in a creative way. He began and ended last season in their starting rotation, but spent most of the time in between as a setup man. Outside of a brief slump in June, he was consistently solid.

Martinez has a very deep pitch mix, led by his changeup, which sits at 80.7 mph. He gets a big separation in velocity between that and his fastball. It's one of the best changeups in baseball with a 46.5% whiff rate, right behind teammate and NL Cy Young award winner Blake Snell. Nearly half of Martinez's total strikeouts came on that pitch.

In 2023, Martinez had a career-low 0.98 HR/9 and a career-high 53.8% groundball rate. He ranked in the 95th percentile among MLB pitchers in hard-hit rate allowed, per Baseball Savant.

Beyond Eury Pérez, the Marlins currently lack right-handed pitchers that they can fully trust for the 2024 season. Martinez put up 1.4 fWAR this season, exactly the same as Eury and more than any other healthy righties on the club (excluding Sandy Alcantara).

The Padres had the opportunity to keep Martinez for $32M over the next two years, while he declined his own option to stay for $16M over that same period. Safe to assume, his free agent price tag should fall in between those figures.

Expect there to be plenty of competition for Martinez's services. It helps that the Padres are trying to cut payroll and probably wouldn't be involved in the bidding. If the Marlins have some sort of advantage, it would be that he's a Miami native who comes from a family of Cuban parents and is bilingual.