A Ray of hope
The Marlins' new head of baseball operations will look to replicate the "Rays Way"
I remember a conversation on a Marlins radio broadcast in 2022 in which I told J.P. Arencibia that, if I were building a baseball operations department from scratch, I would start by trying to raid as much front office talent as I could from 3 organizations: the Rays, the Braves and the Dodgers.
In this generation of Major League Baseball, those franchises have set the standard in terms of amateur and international scouting, player development, player evaluation and talent procurement. No matter how high or how low they draft, they find winning players. Their minor league managers, coaches and instructors prepare those players for the big leagues. And more often than not, when they arrive, they’re able to step in and help win games.
Those teams tend to win trades. They have a knack for finding diamonds in the rough. They hit on minor league free agents. When someone goes down, they often have someone ready to step up. And they build coaching staffs that are generally able to get the most out of the talent with which they have to work, often unlocking success that had previously proved elusive.
I wrote about the Rays specifically when they were off to a record-breaking start in April.
So with that in mind, congratulations to Bruce Sherman, who will reportedly hire Tampa Bay general manager Peter Bendix to oversee the Marlins’ baseball operations department, replacing Kim Ng, with whom Sherman parted ways last month.
Bendix spent the last 15 years with the Rays, joining the club as an intern in 2009 and working his way up to 2nd in command under president of baseball operations Erik Neander for the last 2 seasons.
The 38-year-old Cleveland native and Tufts University alumnus will get a bump in title and, presumably, a bump in salary to make the move 3 1/2 hours south. In doing so, he’ll join a distinguished list of front office executives who other clubs have pried away from the Rays over the last decade who, like Bendix, were asked to bring the secret sauce with them.
Between 2004 and 2014, Andrew Friedman was the original architect of the modern Rays. Hired by owner Stuart Sternberg shortly after he purchased the club, it was Friedman who devised the blueprint and executed the transformation of a laughingstock franchise into a player development and scouting machine that is able to compete annually with the big spenders in the American League East despite operating on a shoestring budget. And as time went on, he hired and nurtured a treasure trove of brainpower.
After the 2014 season, Friedman was lured to the Dodgers for whom he’s employed many of the same principles while operating with a much larger payroll. During his 9 seasons in Los Angeles, Friedman’s Dodgers lead the major leagues in wins, having won more than 100 games more than any other NL club in that span. They’ve played in October each season and trail only the Astros in post-season victories the last 9 years, although they have only one championship to show for their dominant run, in the Covid-abbreviated 2020 season.
After 15 seasons in St. Petersburg, James Click left the Rays to ascend to the top of the Astros’ baseball operations department in 2020. And while he won the World Series in 2022, his 3rd season in Houston would be his last as he clashed with owner Jim Crane.
Chaim Bloom, who initially worked under Friedman and in 2008 authored the “Rays Way” handbook, would eventually grow into an innovative leader of the Tampa Bay front office before departing for a bigger title and paycheck with the Red Sox. Bloom’s Sox reached the postseason only once in his 4 seasons after they’d played in October 10 times in the previous 17 seasons with 4 World Series championships before his arrival. Finishing just a combined 5 games over .500 between 2020 and 2023 wasn’t good enough, and Bloom was fired in September.
According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, it was Bloom, not Bendix, who was Sherman’s initial target for the Marlins leadership position; however, he declined to pursue the position.
Then there is Matt Arnold, who now oversees baseball operations for the Brewers, another Rays front office alumnus who is currently having success elsewhere. Hired away by then Brewers president of baseball operations David Stearns in 2015, he was named Milwaukee’s GM after the 2020 season and succeeded Stearns as president of baseball operations at the end of 2022.
In Miami, Bendix will look to follow in the footsteps of other Friedman proteges, including current Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander, who have, for the most part, enjoyed success when given the chance to run their own organizations.
That said, until any executive is put in a position of ultimate accountability, when he or she has to hire and fire and be the final say on important decisions, you can’t know for sure how they’ll fare.
The reality is, even though he has 15 years of experience at Tropicana Field and served as the Rays’ #2 the last 2 years (despite his general manager title), the 38-year-old Bendix is less-seasoned than Ng was when she was brought to Miami by Derek Jeter in November of 2020. While Bendix’s Rays pedigree is impressive, Ng had significant senior-level experience with successful organizations like the Yankees and Dodgers as well as in MLB’s central office when she arrived at loanDepot park with much fanfare. She also brought a Rolodex of relationships that was as deep as nearly anyone’s in the Game and was immensely respected across the industry.
It’s also worth noting that the Dodgers club Friedman took over—like the Astros club Click led, the Red Sox team of which Bloom was put in charge and the Brewers organization Arnold took over—were all on firmer footing upon their respective arrivals than the Marlins club Bendix will now lead. They all inherited better big league rosters and significantly larger payrolls, and all of their clubs had recent histories of success that dwarfed Miami’s.
None of those former Rays execs had as much work immediately in front of them on day one as Bendix would seem to have.
Will he immediately rebuild the front office? Will he make wholesale changes in player development and scouting, where several important leadership positions have been vacant for a while? And what will he do to improve the major league roster in the short and long term?
Bendix has his work cut out, and he’ll have to hit the ground running with free agency beginning today, the general managers meetings getting underway in Scottsdale tomorrow and the Winter Meetings now less than a month away.
So congrats on what seems to be a solid hire, Bruce. Hope you’re prepared to give your new chief of baseball operations both the financial resources and the time he’ll need to try to build the sustainable winner you’ve been talking about for more than 6 years.
He has a big job ahead of him. Now it’s time to let him get to work.
With the Marlins’ 2023 season in the books, VIEW FROM THE BLEACHERS is looking ahead to 2024 in a multi-part series in which we’re discussing some of the primary burning questions the organization will need to answer this offseason that could go a long way toward defining its short- and long-term future.
If you missed our previous installments in the series (or if you were just hired to run the organization’s baseball operations), you can read the first 5 parts of the series here…
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What does he bring that Kim did not.
You make an interesting point. Bendix has much less experience than Ng. How do we know he’s better than her?