Analysis: The 2020 Miami Marlins - Schrödinger’s Team
In the Community episode, “Introduction to Teaching,” pop culture savant Abed is tasked with determining whether or not Nicholas Cage’s acting is good or bad. Over the course of the story, this task leads him to watching every one of Cage’s films and becoming obsessed with the topic in order to find a definitive answer. But of course, one never comes because Nicholas Cage is just too weird to be entirely one or the other. As such, Abed starts to go insane, leading to one of the best freakouts in TV history at the end of the episode.
This was how I felt trying to figure out if the Miami Marlins are actually good this year.
On one hand, they find themselves competing in the National League Division Series, meaning that not only were they good enough to make the playoffs, but were also good enough to get past the first round. On the other hand, they had the 24th-worst run differential in the league (-35) and seemingly had a lot of lucky breaks go their way to even get this far. So, is Miami an up-and-coming force that’s coming into its own this year? Or, are they actually a bad team that just got extremely lucky in a 60-game season? In many ways, both seem to be true at the exact same time.
Let’s start with the bad. Last season, the Marlins finished with a record of 57 wins and 105 losses. That was good enough for a .352 winning percentage - the second-worst performance in franchise history. While losing was certainly the norm in Miami at that point (their last winning season was 2009), this seemingly represented a new low for the team. Not only was their performance getting worse on the field, but they also had to spend the last two years watching their homegrown prospects (Christian Yelich, Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna, JT Realmuto, etc) lay waste to the rest of the league after their most recent roster teardown.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out what was wrong with the Marlins: they were bad at literally everything. As a team, Miami managed to accumulate just 2.6 fWAR in 2019. To put this into perspective, there were 71 individual players in Major League Baseball that were worth more wins than all of Miami’s players combined. In fact, Ozuna (2.5 fWAR) was almost single handedly as valuable as his former team. In terms of hitting, they had the second-worst wRC+ (79), the worst slugging percentage (.375), and the second-worst on-base percentage (.298) in baseball. On the mound, their staff posted the fourth-lowest pitching WAR (5.9), the sixth-highest FIP (4.89), and the worst walk rate (3.83 BB/9) in the majors. Even their baserunning was atrocious, with their -23.9 BsR being by far the worst of the thirty teams.
And with the exception of a new ownership group (hello, Mr. Jeter), the Marlins really didn’t make a whole lot of major changes going into this season. During the winter, they signed outfielder Corey Dickerson from the Phillies, first baseman Jesús Aguilar from the Rays, and infielder Jonathan Villar from the Orioles. While each of them are solid players that all found regular playing time in Miami (at least, until Villar was traded), none of these moves really screamed “playoffs, here we come!” In fact, the 2020 roster was quite typical for the Marlins: a bunch of minor leaguers that haven’t adjusted to the big league level, bolstered by a group of decent veteran role players and a couple of prospects with genuine superstar potential.
For the most part, they have played accordingly. Considering how many runs they have scored and given up in 2020, their Pythogorean winning percentage was .434, which corresponds to an expected 26 wins over 60 games and 70 wins in a normal season. Considering the team they put on the field, this record would make sense with what we expect from them. So, how did Miami find the extra five wins they needed to get over .500 and into the playoffs? Unfortunately, it seems as though this was more the fault of good luck over a 60-game season than the Marlins being a great team overall.
But with all of that being said, dismissing the Marlins as a terrible team who got in by luck alone is overly simplistic and not necessarily true. Did they benefit from their NL East rivals having rough seasons? Sure. Did they outperform their expectations? Certainly. But what is also true is that they made some decent moves in the offseason, had some of their prospects blossom faster than expected, and they had a manager who brought the clubhouse together. And given how much they have had to overcome, particularly at the beginning of the season, it’s hard to argue that they don’t belong in the postseason this year. Hell, even if the previous playoff system had still been in place, they would have been in a three-way tie for the second Wild Card spot at the end of 2020, meaning that they likely would have still had a shot to play their way in.
However, when you look at the overall numbers for the team, this conclusion may seem kind of strange. After all, their position player fWAR still wasn’t great this year (3.5, 26th in MLB) and their pitching was pretty awful overall (sixth-highest HR/9, fifth-highest FIP, 27th in pitcher WAR). Similarly, while their offense went from being the second-worst in baseball to producing at least at an average level (95 wRC+ this season), their bats were just that: seemingly average.
But of course, this doesn’t take into account two major things about the 2020 Marlins: the first being the circumstances they faced at the beginning of the season and the second being that some of their key players only joined the team later in the year.
As you already know, the Marlins were the first team this season to feel the true effect of COVID-19. After their opening series against Philadelphia, they experienced an outbreak that ultimately affected most of their active roster and postponed their season for nearly a week. When they finally came back to the field, they did so with seventeen new players - most of which were either promoted from the minor league taxi squad or signed as free-agent replacements.
This was a major contributor to the Marlins insane player total this season. Overall, they used 61 different players over the course of their 60 games, by far the most in MLB (no other team used more than 49). So if you’re wondering why their team WAR totals are so low, it’s mainly that 1) most of the players they used didn’t get to play long enough to accumulate large WAR totals 2) many of the key players that would contribute to the team’s WAR were out for a significant chunk of the season recovering from COVID and 3) most of the replacement players they used were, well, replacement level. Let’s face it, using a AA lineup for a quarter of your games is going to dampen your team stats quite a bit (just ask the Yankees).
But once all of their normal starters came back, major prospects like Sixto Sánchez were brought up, and new additions like Starling Marte were brought in, the Marlins were a completely different team. After September 1st, their pitching staff went from being one of the worst in the league to being solidly average. In fact, 2.0 of their 2.2 pitching WAR this year came after the trade deadline (and after their replacement arms were sent back down). Additionally, their offense also improved in the second half, ranking in the middle third in pretty much every category and posting a wRC+ of exactly 100. Again, this performance wasn’t earth-shattering by any means, but it did mean that the Marlins were a well-rounded team with a decent lineup and good pitching at the top of the rotation. And in a year like this, that is all you need to be.
In fact, this was what made them so dangerous against the Cubs in the Wild Card round. On offense, they matched up well with Chicago. While both teams came in with remarkably similar production over the full season, the second half was a completely different story for both squads:
Cubs (full season): .220/.318/.387, 91 wRC+, .309 wOBA, 25.7 K%
Marlins (full season): .244/.319/.384, 95 wRC+, .308 wOBA, 24.8 K%
Cubs (after 9/1): .212/.302/.343, 76 wRC+, .286 wOBA, 24.2 K%
Marlins (after 9/1): .251/.323/.402, 100 wRC+, .315 wOBA, 23.7 K%
Even though the Cubs had a Cy Young finalist in Yu Darvish and another solid starter in Kyle Hendricks, Miami had a similarly dangerous one-two punch in Sixto Sánchez and Sandy Alcántara. And given Chicago’s anemic hitting late in the year, it was much more likely that the latter two would shut down the Cubs lineup than the other way around. This was a series that Miami should have won, and they did.
Sure, the Marlins have shown flashes of being awful from time to time. After all, they did suffer losses of 29-9, 11-0, 15-0, and 11-1 in the span of just 18 games. But they have had major flashes of brilliance as well. For example, in that same 18-game stretch, they also won a bunch of games with scores of 8-0, 8-1, and 14-3. Some teams are average because they are consistently middle of the road, and other teams are average because they can either be absolutely awful or positively brilliant on any given day. Miami is certainly in the latter group here. In this sense, the 2020 Marlins are Schrödinger’s team - you don’t know who they’re going to be until you take them out of the box and put them out on the field.
So, after all of this, can I say with any certainty that the Marlins are either good or bad? Unfortunately, no. Which is annoying, because my instinct as a writer and an analyst is to answer these types of questions. But alas, my being doesn’t account for the Miami freaking Marlins.