One Regend

That remains to be seen. Brinson, Alfaro, Monte Harrison all had loud tools. They couldn't do anything with those tools, but they were loud. Jeter sucked at his job, but at least he tried to find talent. I don't know what Bendix is trying to build here, with the glut of 1B/DH prospects and 2B/COF prospects with no offensive impact. The idea of trading star players do not bother me. This team wasn't going anywhere, even with those players. But if you're going to trade star players, you have to get fair value out of those trades. This is where Bendix drops the ball. Unless you're happy with a bunch of 1B/DH prospects playing out of position and looking like a defensive mess, or you're okay with an Adeiny Hechavarria who can't hit above .250 or get on base over .300, I don't see how you're okay with the trade returns we've got. Bendix's return packages have been mediocre at best, and if I were to assume the worst, downright detrimental to the team's development. I do appreciate that you have hope in this team's future, and believe me, I wish I could. I just do not see it. Come, 4 years down the line, when Starlyn Caba gets Rule 5'd after 3 ineffective seasons, and Deyvision De Los Santos gets traded for lesser value than they gave up for him because he's being blocked by Agustin Ramirez, and PJ Morlando flames out in AA because nobody wants to play a COF guy who can't field or run and can barely hit, you can circle back to this post and I'll be the first to tell you "I told you so." But maybe the Marlins can surprise me. Maybe Starlyn Caba can develop his hit tool or plate discipline. Maybe Deyvision De Los Santos can improve his dexterity and be able to handle 3rd base. Maybe PJ Morlando won't look like a guy that should've been drafted in the 2nd Round. Maybe the Marlins coaching somehow becomes good at developing talent on a generational level. Then, and *maybe then*, do I see this team reaching the heights of 1997. I don't see it happening right now, though.

With all the godawful moves the Marlins have made in the offseason, this is the only transaction I can say with certainty that they have gotten right. Maybe having a good play by play might actually make this team be bearable to watch.

He's not wrong. Why root for a rookie core that's destined to fail? Bendix traded all of our valuable pieces for prospects that are very one-note. How am I supposed to have hope for the future when our prospect core is very flawed? Somehow I feel less hopeful for this team's future than I did following 2017's selloff. At least the prospects we acquired back then had loud tools. I can't think of a single tool this prospect core has that would be considered loud. The closest I can maybe think of is Agustin Ramirez, and he's got his own problems. It hurts watching this team be disassembled and replaced with flotsam and jetsam.

Even if we landed him, it wouldn't help us much. He would elevate this team from 110 losses to 106. And he'd likely be a free agent before we're good again. There's really not much more to say.

I wasn't around to actually vote in the polls, so I will give you my answers in text. I give the Marlins offseason a straight F. They were completely reckless with what little trade assets they had left. We traded two highly reputable players for 1B/DH prospects, prospects with zero power and maybe a glove, and 5'9 2B who have unsustainable power. Any real General Manager mind would've gotten better returns for their valuable pieces. Peter Bendix failed spectactularly here. 2024 was bad. It was so bad, the Marlins lost 100 games for the 4th time in franchise history. Instead of infusing the system with talented prospects, they did nothing but overload an already crowded position. So now 2025 is looking to take an even further step back than 2024 did. Except, now, there will be no help from the farm system. It's very plausible to see this team lose more than 110 games in 2025. This is not hyperbole. Unless they do an immaculate job with drafting prospects (which, sadly, the 2024 draft gave us a brief glimpse at Bendix's drafting strategy, and it doesn't look good), things will remain bleak for the forseeable future. 2024 was horrible, but 2025 is going to somehow be worse. Remarkably worse, at that. If we don't finish last place, then something has gone horribly wrong in Washington.

There's just a major problem with that. Most of the acquisitions we've been getting are 1B/DH type of bats... which Troy Johnston also profiles as. We have DLS. We have Agustin Ramirez. We have Jonah Bride. We just signed Eric Wagaman to a guaranteed deal. We just picked up Matt Mervis for basically free. All of these also profile as 1B/DH types. There's just no room for him on this roster due to the questionable way it was constructed. Peter Bendix masterclass!!

At least Josh Booty made it to the majors. Tyler Kolek never even sniffed AA.

I'm honestly glad the Marlins media finally asked the hard questions. I've talked with @MarlinsJohn about this a while back, but for a while, I always thought the media felt too scared to press the front office with hard questions and felt we had gotten too soft. It's about time we've directly asked Bendix the real questions. The fact he has refused to respond to them is a telltale sign of which direction our franchise is going, though. Sit tight. With Bendix at the helm, the next 10 years are going to be brutal.

We all forgot one factor that could lead up to Sandy's re-emergence as a great rotation piece. These were his stats from July onward in 2023. While I wouldn't say he was his 2022 form, he looked closer to his 2022 form here than he did in the first 3 months of the season. There's reason to believe he can bounce back. It won't be an overnight process though. He hasn't thrown a pitch on the mound in an official game in over a year. He will likely need a lot of reps to ramp back up into a regular workload, so it may take some time for him to settle in.

This looks like a 110-loss team, honestly. I expect Sandy and Brax to be traded for packages of 1B/DH prospects and some 5'9 2B prospects by the end of July, because apparently, that's what Peter Bendix has an overwhelming desire for. Something tells me hiring a Tampa Bay castoff as a front office executive is going to be even worse than Jeter's clownshow.

I'm honestly shocked they got anything for Brujan. It makes me wonder what the Cubs saw in him that was worth pursuing. Not that I see any value in Matt Mervis either.

Every pitcher these days has a health risk. Every single one of them. Jesus Luzardo is not special in that regard. If this is the excuse for such a mediocre return, it's a bad excuse. There's no excuse for this kind of trade. It was bad from the day it was done, and it's going to be bad for us 6 years down the line.

My thoughts on the rotation depth. I don't see Bellozo as a real candidate to start games for Miami. He's a ticking time bomb just waiting to blow up on their faces. That 5.73 FIP perfectly encapsulates this. He got lucky last year. He's not gonna continue being this lucky. Meyer flashed potential early on, got injured, and lost whatever made him effective sometime during the injury stint. He needs to rediscover what made him the best starting pitcher before demotion. Adam Mazur could have potential. I'm counting his starts with the Padres as typical MLB first call-up jitters. It also didn't help the Padres rushed him to the majors. If developed properly, he could be a key rotation piece. The key word is IF. Snelling feels very concerning. He might be another Cabrera type where he's so incredibly talented but can't land his pitches inside the broad side of the barn. He might honestly be a reliever risk. But I'd sooner trust him than trust Bellozo. People say our pitching is our strong suit, but to me, it is mediocre at best. Beyond Sandy and Weathers, and maybe a mid-season Perez, I don't see anyone to get real excited for every 5th day. And we jettisoned our best relievers at the trade deadline, so our already shaky bullpen is even more shaky. I'm not going to buy into our pitching. It's a tank year, regardless of what we have. It's time to embrace the tank.

Our AAA guys are better hitters than the guys we got from this trade. Let that sink in.

Honestly, I'd compare Peter Bendix more to Gary Denbo. And honestly, from what it looks like, he's making Gary Denbo look good. That's not a good sign of things to come.

So we gave up a highly talented left-handed starting pitcher in favor of... an Adeiny Hechavarria type and a Magneuris Sierra type. ...Actually, comparing these two prospects to those two names might be a compliment. I don't see them coming anywhere close to making a major impact on the major league level. I've come to learn something over the past year. Peter Bendix and his crew can be many things. But talent evaluators, they are not. Maybe I should be glad we got screwed by the lottery. Even if we got the #1 overall in the 2025 draft, Bendix and his crew would've found a way to screw it up.

He isn't. If Norby was bad at 3rd base defensively, Bride is dreadful at 3rd base. That is a situation that will have to be resolved externally, as there are exactly zero in-house solutions.

The hope is that DLS fares way better than Monte Harrison/Isan Diaz/Lewis Brinson did at the plate. And Ramirez is not a catcher; trying to force him into a catcher's role is a fool's errand. I think what Bendix tried to do is pick up these 1B/DH prospects and hope at least one of them turns out. The Marlins have been dead last in OPS for the past 6 years and that needed to change. I would've rather picked up a middle infielder instead, but teams won't trade shortstop prospects, and the only middle infielders teams feel like trading are 5'7 infielders with 15-20 HR bats that won't be sustainable.

I get that we're tired of losing, but this needed to happen. We were going absolutely nowhere with the Jazz player core. Yes, minor league teams that don't score isn't fun, but what is even less fun is a major league team that doesn't score. (the 2018-2023 era) That's what ultimately doomed them. Here's to hoping the offensive prospects we received actually develops. The best we can hope for is building at least a major league average offense and a killers row rotation.

This is entirely by design. I wanted them to strip this team down to the bone, and leave no survivors. They did exactly that. The only valuable guys they couldn't get rid of were guys that still had multiple controllable years and were coming off of a major injury that they still need to prove won't hamper them moving forward. They were in desperate need of a youth movement after all of their prospects flamed out in 2021, and they are finally in one. I expect to see DLS and Agustin Ramirez in the lineup at some point in 2025.

I don't see the Marlins trading Sandy Alcantara yet. It makes no sense to move him when he's coming off surgery. They'd have to bank on him tossing a semi-respectable pitching line in 2025 before they consider moving him. I do see Jesus Luzardo gone at the trade deadline though, if he performs anywhere close to his 2023 pitching line.

I don't like any of these candidates. At all. No disrespect to any of these players, as some of them might end up being role players, but none of these prospects are what I call "franchise-changing". We needed a franchise-changing prospect. We needed Ethan Holliday. None of these players are anywhere close.

The MLB Lottery results only prove to us that the Marlins can't have anything nice in the world. What a joke. When the Cardinals, who are an organizational mess in their own right, picks higher than a team that deliberately threw away the entire season just for a chance at transcendent talent, you know your team is snakebitten. I'm not going to watch or follow the 2025 MLB Draft. None of the projected 7th slot prospects are worth following, in my honest opinion. The Marlins Brass are going to try to hype it up, like usual, but I'm not going to buy it. We needed an Ethan Holliday. Now we're not going to get him, or anyone that's on his level.

But my question is, will Vargas actually stick at SS? Our current solution to SS right now is Xavier Edwards, and that just can't fly. Defensively, he's a 2B at best, and that's a very generous claim -- He could be following the Luis Arraez path of being a 1B/DH. The next best option at SS would be Otto Lopez and Lopez leaves a lot to be desired offensively. We just don't have anyone -- either on the 40 man roster or in the lower levels -- that can take charge at SS and not be a liability one way or another. Jake Burger needed to be traded though. We have a logjam at 1B, with Jonah Bride, DLS, and Agustin Ramirez all likely to be battling for that spot in the lineup. (Agustin Ramirez is not a catcher. You can't convince me otherwise.) Whether it pans out for us, we have yet to see. We got a surprising value out of someone who doesn't get on base, doesn't play defense, strikes out a lot, and only gets value out of HRs.

I find that a noodle arm in center field is leagues worse than a noodle arm at short. At least you still have a double play opportunity if someone reaches 1st on Xavier Edwards noodle arm at short. There's nothing worse than giving up extra bases because the center fielder's arm is DH tier.