PERSPECTIVE: It's Time

As we begin year 6 of "the build," the clock is ticking on Bruce Sherman's Marlins

“We know we have a lot of work in front of us, on the field and off the field, and I know we're up to the challenge.”

Bruce Sherman, at his introductory press conference, October 3, 2017

As the Marlins prepare to open their 6^th season under owner Bruce Sherman, it’s time.

Not time to #Re2pectTheProcess. Not time to see progress. Not time to build some momentum for the future. Not time to tell us about the tremendous strides they’re making.

It’s time to win.

Sherman is no longer the Marlins’ new owner. He long ago crossed the bridge where he can point to challenges facing the club and blame them on Jeffrey Loria. There’s no more, “We inherited a roster without any depth and a terrible farm system.”

This is his team. This is his farm system. This is his front office. This is his general manager. This is his TV deal. This is his ballpark naming rights deal. This is his club president, his chief of marketing, his chief of communications. This is his fan base.

And these are his challenges.

At his introductory press conference on October 3, 2017, he told us, “I know we’re up to the challenge.”

To this point, however, his organization has not been. And 2023 is the year Sherman and his organization must change that.

There was a time for patience. There was a time to sit back and let Sherman and Derek Jeter, to whom the owner gave 100 percent autonomy in all areas of the operation, roll up their sleeves and set about the hard work of transforming the franchise on and off the field. It was a massive undertaking. There’s no denying that. But they took it on.

Now here we are, more than 5 years later. Jeter has departed. Much of the club’s senior business and baseball leadership, most of whom were hired on Sherman’s watch, are gone.

What remains? Most of the same issues the owner inherited.

What have the first 5 seasons of Sherman’s ownership produced?

A playoff appearance after the Marlins limped home with a 31-29 record in the Covid-abbreviated 2020 season. A sign of progress? We hoped so at the time. But not the way 2021 and 2022 played out.

On the field, the Marlins have a .406 winning percentage, worst in the National League and 4th-worst in Major League Baseball since Sherman’s first Opening Day in 2018. Only the Royals, Tigers and Orioles have won fewer games in that 5-year period. Relative to the rest of the National League East, Miami is 124 wins behind the Braves, 80 behind the Mets, 71 behind the Phillies and 34 behind the Nationals since Sherman purchased the club.

The Marlins are last in MLB in runs scored over the last 5 years. In that span, they’ve scored 1,040 runs fewer than the ML-leading Dodgers (an average of 208 fewer runs per season). Relative to the NL East, they’re 865 runs behind the Braves, 588 behind the Nationals, 562 behind the Phillies and 485 behind the Mets.

As much as they hang their hat on their pitching, and it has improved annually under the mentorship of Mel Stottlemyre Jr., the Marlins rank 10^th in the 15-team NL and 18^th in MLB in ERA over the first 5 seasons of Sherman’s ownership, 4^th among the 5 teams in the NL East.

The farm system they vowed to rebuild? It’s shown some potential, and there’s clearly reason to be optimistic about the number of young arms the Marlins have stockpiled despite the major injury woes endured by top pitching prospects Max Meyer, Jake Eder and Sixto Sanchez.

But the organization’s inability to evaluate and develop hitters is alarming, as is the fact the Marlins have already traded away the first 2 #1 picks they selected under this ownership, 2018 #1 Connor Scott and 2019 #1 J.J. Bleday, as well as their 2^nd 2019 pick Kameron Misner.

That explains, in part, why a system that MLB Pipeline ranked 4^th-best in all of Baseball at the start of the 2021 season stands 18^th in the same ranking as we begin 2023.

Yes, the Marlins spent to improve their big league roster this offseason after extending Sandy Alcantara and signing free agents Avisail Garcia and Jorge Soler last winter. But if you look at the Opening Day 26-man roster 6 years into the Sherman era, how many sure things do you see on this ballclub? Alcantara is as good as any pitcher in MLB. But where else on the diamond do you see players not with potential but with actual track records of success and health that make you confident they will be as good as or better than their counterparts on the Braves, Mets and Phillies? And those are merely the hurdles the Marlins need to clear in their own division.

Do they need more time?

When the Cubs tore their ballclub down to the studs, Theo Epstein rebuilt and won a World Series in 2016, his 5^th season at the helm. After posting a .412 winning percentage and finishing last in the NL Central in each his first 3 seasons on the North Side, Epstein’s Cubs won 97 games and a Wild Card in 2015 before winning 103 and the franchise’s first World Series since 1908 in 2016. Beginning in 2015, Theo’s 4^th season, the Cubs reached the postseason in 4 straight seasons and 5 of 6.

Then there is the example of the Houston Astros’ rebuild. When Jeff Luhnow took over the club, the Astros posted a major league-worst .362 winning percentage from 2012-14. In his 4^th season, they won 86 games and an AL Wild Card. After an 84-win season in 2016, the Astros catapulted to 101 wins and a World Series title in 2017, the 6^th year of their rebuild. Beginning in 2017, they’ve played in 6 consecutive post-seasons, reaching at least the ALCS every year, winning 4 pennants and 2 World Series titles.

This is year 6 for Sherman’s Marlins. Is there any reason to honestly believe they are on the doorstep of a run similar to those made by the Cubs and Astros?

As for how the struggles of the last 5 seasons have translated off the field in Miami, despite the ballpark improvements Sherman deserves credit for—an effort spearheaded by since-departed senior-level executives Adam Jones, Chip Bowers, Claude Delorme and Jeff King--the Marlins have drawn fewer than one million fans to loanDepot park in every year of this ownership.

That had happened once in franchise history, including strike-shortened seasons and in the wake of fire sales, before it has occurred in all 4 years in which fans have been allowed in the ballpark since Sherman took over.

The Marlins announced nearly 1.6 million fans in 2017, the final season under Loria. They announced 907,487 in 2022. They like to boast that number was higher than what they drew in 2019, the previous pre-Covid full season with fans in attendance. It is. Still, the 2022 figure ranked 29^th out of the 30 ML clubs. Want the glass-half-full perspective? Last season was the first year the Marlins didn’t rank dead-last in MLB in attendance on Sherman’s watch.

Judging by the attendance, the connection with the community Sherman and Jeter talked about in their introductory media session has not been made. And that’s despite the tireless efforts of the Miami Marlins Foundation, which has been without a leader since its previous executive director left the club to accept another job last September, and the Community Impact department, whose passion for making lives better is unsurpassed in MLB.

What could have been one of the happiest ownership honeymoon periods in sports history—with the baseball-loving Sherman and the iconic Jeter taking over from the beleaguered Loria and David Samson—was flushed down the toilet.

You can argue—and I admittedly did—that the Marlins’ best chance of building a sustainable winner was to trade Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna and J.T. Realmuto to create roster and payroll flexibility. But you needed to receive substantial value in those trades. Outside of the spectacular Alcantara and Zac Gallen (who was later spun off to Arizona for Jazz Chisholm), the Marlins whiffed terribly. The Yelich deal in particular will go down among the worst in recent memory.

Those baseball moves aside, this ownership group shot itself in the foot when it forced former club President David Samson to dismiss the 2 most popular figures in Marlins history, Jeff Conine and Jack McKeon, as well as revered Hall of Famers Andre Dawson and Tony Perez. Weeks later, they shocked their fan base by ousting beloved and respected television broadcaster Rich Waltz.

Welcome to Miami!

Every one of those moves was an unforced error that made a challenging job all the more difficult.

But that was 2017. More than 5 years have passed. Fans have moved on from many of those decisions because that’s what fans ultimately do. When there’s not much to celebrate in the past, they turn their focus to the present and the future.

And that brings us back to where we began. To 2023. Year 6. I can’t imagine the conversation we’re having on the eve of Opening Day 2024 if this team isn’t exponentially better in the new season we ring in Thursday afternoon.

For the Marlins, the time is now.

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