Tag Archives: Miami Marlins

Marlins misery continues

1 Reply

I was writing up some notes on Tuesday evening for my next MLB round-up column and it was a relatively modest list of news items. Knowing that I might need a distraction from the England friendly, I decided to leave writing it to Wednesday evening.

I was very glad I had made that decision when I looked at MLB.com over breakfast on Wednesday morning.

The Toronto Blue Jays and Miami Marlins have agreed a blockbuster trade that will greatly raise the spirits of Blue Jays fans and further demoralise a Marlins fan base that has been kicked in the teeth time and time again.

ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick summed it up perfectly: “The franchise that knows no shame — and has a long and illustrious history of slashing and burning — has sunk to new and previously unimaginable depths”.

There is a place for considered rebuilding by teams that don’t have the highest payrolls. Sacrificing a few years to build up a collection of good young talent is a sensible strategy and we’ve seen recently how it has turned around the fortunes of the other Florida team, the Tampa Bay Rays.

However, what the Marlins are doing is little short of disgraceful from a sporting perspective. They are making a mockery of being called a Major League team in a way that is especially distasteful considering their circumstances.

What sort of an organization moves into a new $515m ballpark, in part paid for with $360 million in public money, and then completely blows up their roster – the Marlins have now dealt pretty much all of the estabilshed players earning more than the MLB minimum salary – less than a year after it has first opened?

Attendances didn’t rise as much as hoped in the first season of the new Marlins Ballpark, but it wasn’t simply the poor facilities in their previous home that were putting people off. The owner and Front Office have alienated many potential fans and the team often wasn’t performing on the field, giving fans an excuse to spend their money elsewhere.

The underlying problem here is that whilst we can all lambast the Marlins, because of the way MLB works they are exploiting an understandable strategy.

There is no penalty whatsoever for owner Jeffrey Loria and his Front Office to act in this way. They’ve got their ballpark and they’ll continue to rake in millions of dollars in revenue sharing money. If they didn’t think their team would really be competing for a playoff spot over the next couple of seasons, why bother to spend the money on the Major League payroll?

You could say they owe it to the fans and the integrity of the competition, but since when did such thoughts get in the way of making money?

It doesn’t feel right and it’s not right, yet MLB aren’t going to do anything about it so why should Loria care?

The safeguard against such behaviour in football is the threat of relegation. You cannot punt a season or two because if you go down your revenues plummet over night, as does the value of the business.  With no true pyramid from which to promote another team, that’s never going to be an option in MLB.

I suspect there may be owners among the larger spending teams that would be quite happy to see some of the pooled money taken away from teams like the Marlins that are doing precious little to contribute to the pot, but we all know that’s not going to happen any time soon either.

The only potential way to stop a team acting in this way would be some sort of contractual clause that effectively forced an owner to sell the team in certain circumstances, such as lowering the payroll below a specific level.  Whilst the MLB Commissioner’s Office does wield some power, for all intents and purposes it is there to do the bidding of the 30 ownership groups. The owners would have to approve such a clause and that’s as likely as a Norfolk Bronze turkey buying shares in Bernard Matthews.

MLB did effectively force former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt to sell the team against his wishes recently but that sorry saga showed exactly how unfair the system can be. McCourt was a complete and utter embarrasment during his ownership and no sane person would let him run a bath, never mind one of the most historic sports teams in the world.

McCourt’s ultimate punishment was to sell the team, that he bought for $430m, for $2.15bn. Just like Loria, he’ll happily take all the negative publicity on his shoulders whilst trousering all the money.

One team’s blow-up is another team’s opportunity though and, to end on a positive note, the bounty received by the Blue Jays will make the AL East even more interesting in 2013.

Only a few days ago I was being a bit rude about General Manager Alex Anthopoulos in likening his signing of Maicer Izturis to buying a toaster. In fairness to myself, I didn’t know at the time that he was buying a toaster to complement a brand new fitted kitchen.

Mike Redmond enters the Marlins’ madhouse

Leave a reply

There are only 30 Major League managerial gigs. If you aspire to leading a team at the highest level, especially as a young manager looking to make his mark, a vacancy at any one of them is a huge potential opportunity.

Mike Redmond was announced as the new manager of the Miami Marlins last week and he will come to the job full of enthusiasm and a belief that he can succeed where others have failed.

However, joining up with the Marlins is not the easiest of starts for a rookie manager.

There are great surprises and sorry disappointments in every MLB season and the Miami Marlins were firmly in the latter category in 2012.

This was supposed to be the start of a wonderful new era for baseball in Miami. The team was finally moving into a new ballpark, they splashed the cash on the free agent market by signing Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Heath Bell and they set it all off with a new name, logo and uniform.

The message was clear: the days of the Florida Marlins fielding cheap teams in front of small crowds was over.

The first statement of intent in the Marlins’ magical offseason was the heist of a big-name manager from another team. Ozzie Guillen was taken from the Chicago White Sox and given a lucrative four-year/$10m contract.  In one of his first acts when the 2012 season began, gaffe-prone Guillen offended the sizeable local Cuban-American community by stating his admiration for Fidel Castro. He survived calls for him to be sacked but was given a five-game suspension by his team.

Perhaps we should have realised straight away that the dream was going to turn into a nightmare.

The hope and optimism quickly disappeared. After all the pre-season changes, the Marlins ended up losing 3 more games than they had in 2011 (69-93 rather than 72-90). They finished the season with Hanley Ramirez, Anibal Sanchez and Omar Infante all playing for other teams after being traded away and the rumours came true soon after the season ended when Guillen’s tenure was brought to an abrupt end.

The Marlins are not shy about giving managers the boot. The Atlanta Braves won 14 of their 18 games against the Marlins in the season just gone, on their way to a Wild Card berth, and manager Fredi Gonzalez must have found each victory a little sweeter than the standard variety considering he was kicked to one side by the Marlins’ top brass during the 2010 season, only to be picked up by the Braves to succeed the legendary Bobby Cox.

Gonzalez’s predecessor didn’t have trouble finding another job when he was sacked either. Joe Girardi won the National League Manager of the Year award in his first – and only – year in charge of Florida in 2006. Girardi got into an argument with owner Jeffrey Loria and was discarded, an episode that damaged Girardi’s standing so badly that he became the New York Yankees manager in 2008 and has been in situ ever since, capturing a World Series along the way.

It’s enough to make you think that maybe it’s not the manager, ballpark and uniforms that are the problem with the Marlins.

You can’t sack an owner though, so it falls to Mark Redmond to battle against the madness and to turn the team around. There is talent on the roster – the disappointing Heath Bell has already been jettisoned to the D-Backs – and good reason to believe that improvement is a very realistic proposition so long as expectations are suitably restrained.

Redmond was the back-up catcher on the 2003 World Series-winning Marlins team and by all accounts knows the owner and president of baseball operations, Larry Beinfest, well so he will be going into the situation with his eyes wide open.

This is also a man who, during his playing career with the Marlins, tried to help his team get out of a slump in form by taking batting practice stark naked.

Maybe Redmond has just enough madness in him to make the Marlins’ madhouse a winner again.

Look before you throw

5 Replies

There was an interesting play in the game between the Marlins and Phillies on Monday.

The speedy Emilio Bonifacio was leading off the sixth inning for Miami and attempted to bunt his way on to first base.  The bunt went towards the pitcher’s mound towards the first-base side.  Cole Hamels jumped from the mound, scooped up the ball and fired it to first base.

Unfortunately for Hamels, he didn’t look before he let the ball go.

The Phillies had two relatively inexperienced fielders on the right-hand side of the infield. Rookie Freddy Galvis has a reputation as being a good fielder, but he’s spent most of his time in the Minors at shortstop and has moved to second base to cover for the injured Chase Utley. John Mayberry Jnr is also covering for an injured teammate, Ryan Howard, at first base. Mayberry has some experience at first base, particularly in college, but has generally been used in the outfield in the Majors.

Mayberry ran in to field Bonifacio’s bunt, which he was never going to reach, and his instincts told him to keep going rather than try to get back to first base. Meanwhile Galvis was slow to move towards first to cover the now unguarded bag.

The result was Hamels’ throw to a ghost fielder at first base, which is not what you need with anyone at the plate, never mind a burner like Bonifacio. He ended up at third base and was driven home by Gaby Sanchez.

It was a collective miscue by the trio. Hamels was the player lumbered with the error and while he didn’t look greatly impressed with his teammates, he was ultimately culpable of throwing the ball without checking there was anyone there to catch it. 

The crucial factor was that he probably would have taken a second before throwing, just as Mayberry may not have been so desperate to react to the bunt, had it not been a base-runner as quick as Bonifacio putting pressure on them.

Put it down to an inexperienced fielding collective, a bit of early season rust and the mind-scrambling impact that genuine speed out of the batter’s box can cause.  

Marlins mobbed by Angels in search for offseason spotlight

Leave a reply

Up until Thursday afternoon UK time, the Winter Meetings were all about the Miami Marlins.

Closer Heath Bell was signed just prior to the gathering in Texas, shortstop Jose Reyes joined him in parading in the new Miami colours, and then the rumours kept on coming.

A huge offer had been extended to first baseman Albert Pujols, with members of the Marlins’ staff reportedly looking confident that they would get their man. Meanwhile a staggering six-year deal had been delivered to starting pitcher C.J. Wilson alongside a contract offer to fellow hurler Mark Buehrle.

It was beginning to look like everyone would be heading to Miami, and not just for some offseason sand, sea and surf.

When it was reported on Wednesday evening that Buehrle had accepted the opportunity to reunite with manager Ozzie Guillen, it initially appeared to confirm the trend. However, soon the signing suggested that the Marlins may have been bowing out on their other current targets.

In fact, the Marlins were still very much in the running, but their pursuit – despite tabling the most lucrative contract offers to both players – would be in vain.

I was shocked when I logged on to MLB.com late Thursday afternoon and saw that the Los Angeles Angels had signed both Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson. Shocked, stunned and then deflated.

As an A’s fan who has spent the last few weeks reading that the only thing my team will be doing this offseason is trying to trade away our best players, watching a division rival spend a reported $331,500,000 on two players summed up how laughably difficult our current plight is. Any Brit who has watched Moneyball in recent weeks and got an idea of the team’s underdog status doesn’t know the half of it.

Add in the fact that the Marlins were able to offer such vast sums on the back of their impending move into a new ballpark and it just goes to show that if Bud Selig is as committed to competitiveness as he claims, he should be doing all he can to help the A’s find a new home.

The A’s misery is joined by the despair in Houston. They’ve finally seen the back of Pujols, only to know that it’s just a one year reprieve before they are reunited in 2013.

Welcome to the AL West.

There’s no doubt that the double signing is a tremendous coup for the Angels.

The one criticism that could be, and has been, levelled at owner Arte Moreno and the Angels’ Front Office is that they have consistently come up short in recent years on adding that one extra impact hitter that would have pushed them from contenders to a fearsome threat. Their unfathomable decision a year ago to take on arguably the worst contract in baseball in Vernon Wells added volume to those dissenting voices.

When it comes to answering such criticism, dishing out the second most lucrative contract in the sport’s history to sign one of the greatest hitters of all time is a pretty good way to do it.

At ten years and $254m (£162,351,084.15, or £312,213 every week for the next ten years – as Charlie Brown would say: good grief!) with a no-trade clause, it is an extraordinary commitment to make. There is obviously a risk that Pujols’ contract could become a burden in its latter years, but extraordinary commitments are required to sign extraordinary players and there’s every chance that even if he does tail off over the years, he will have earned his money before then anyway.

As for Wilson, that signing wasn’t such a surprise. Although the Marlins were clearly a very attractive proposition, linking up with the Angels almost made too much sense for it not to happen. He gets to stay at home in Southern California, in a division he knows well and on a team that will be extremely competitive and will pay him a sizeable amount of money ($77.5m over five years, or £190,415 per week), if not the absolute top dollar that he could have received from Miami.

The Angels’ moves have set up what could be an epic two-way battle in the AL West with the Texas Rangers for several years to come (I’ve probably moaned enough already about what it will mean for the A’s, so we’ll leave that part of the argument to one side).  Both teams will have a great shot at making the postseason under the new double Wild Card format from 2013, although one will face the prospect of seeing their ultra-talented and expensive team potentially being knocked out on the back of one game. 

The joy of Angels fans will be counterbalanced by the disappointment of Cardinals fans who have seen their iconic first baseman depart. Even on Wednesday night, it looked as though there was a strong chance that Pujols would stay in St. Louis, so it will be a shock to see him go, if not one that was completely unexpected.  Still, they have just experienced the delight of winning the World Series and with Adam Wainwright coming back from a season out injured, alongside a new position player or two from the money that would have gone towards Pujols’ salary, they are not about to turn into an also-ran.

And as for those Marlins, three out of five isn’t a bad return from an elite free agent shopping list heading into the Winter Meetings.  Something tells me they haven’t finished shopping yet either.

It will be very difficult for them to steal the offseason spotlight away from the Angels now, but I’m sure they will give it a good try.