The people have spoken

Breaking down the results of our latest VFTB fan poll

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With Spring Training underway in Jupiter, we posed 10 questions to our loyal VFTB readers last week in an effort to take the pulse of Marlins Nation at the beginning of Bruce Sherman’s 7th season of ownership.

Here are the results of this highly-scientific survey.

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More than half of respondents (55 percent) agreed with The Athletic and gave the Marlins an F for their work this winter. Nearly 3 of 4 (73 percent) awarded a D or an F, and 89 percent—basically 9 out of 10 voters—gave the club a C or worse.

Any positivity has to be the result of optimism surrounding the hiring of new president of baseball operations Peter Bendix and the work he’s doing behind the scenes to build up the department’s infrastructure.

While it is fair to say Bendix will need time to construct the sustainable winner owner Bruce Sherman promised when he took control of the club in October of 2017, it’s not quite that simple.

The Marlins are a franchise desperate to build support among South Florida baseball fans. “You’ve given us 6 years already, but give us more time” is not what people want to hear at this point, particularly those who thought they saw a light at the end of the unending tunnel last season.

There was a slight increase in attendance with the team’s surprising playoff run in 2023. If this were my team, I’d invest to build upon that in 2024 and not tighten my belt and take what now appears to be an inevitable step backward. How many times has this fanbase seen the Marlins take one step forward, then 2 steps back.

If my stated goal was to build a team capable of sustaining success, I’d try to sustain—and build upon—the success the team had in 2023.

With the industry thriving financially as it is, and with Sherman’s pledge to fans last spring to take any money from increased attendance and put it right back into the team, the Marlins being the only one of 30 major league clubs to not spend a single dollar on a major league free agent between the end of last season and the start of Spring Training—while also nickel and diming popular players in arbitration—is not a good look.

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81 percent of respondents say the Marlins are either slightly or significantly worse today than they were at the end of 2023.

Losing 36-home run slugger Jorge Soler as a free agent and making no effort to replace him when the Marlins were last in the league in scoring a season ago says a lot about what to expect from this team offensively.

And with workhorse Sandy Alcantara out for the entire season following Tommy John surgery, the starting rotation takes a massive hit. With no outside additions, his replacement will come from a group of pitchers who have wither had extensive injury histories or limited track records of success as big league starters.

I wrote extensively last year about the Marlins’ 33 one-run victories being entirely unsustainable going into a new season. When you combine that with the roster taking 2 major hits with no significant upgrades, it’s hard to disagree with 81 percent of you.

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More than 2 of 3 respondents expect an offense that was last in the league in scoring last season to be worse in 2024.

The aforementioned loss of Jorge Soler and the lack of impactful offseason additions is at the heart of that pessimism.

The 11 percent who suspect the lineup will be better this year would likely point to an anticipated full season of 2023 deadline pick-ups Jake Burger and Josh Bell (although Bell, in the final year of his contract, is an obvious candidate to be dealt at the deadline if the Marlins aren’t in contention).

The optimists will also anticipate a full, healthy year from Jazz Chisholm. Just because it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but..

They might also hope for at least a little production from Avisail Garcia if he’s even kept around for year 3 of the 4-year, $53 million deal Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter gifted him.

We’ll see.

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Losing a workhorse like Sandy Alcantara who is just a year removed from a Cy Young Award would be a blow to any pitching staff.

Among all Marlins pitchers, only Pablo Lopez, now a Minnesota Twin, has thrown even half as many innings as Alcantara since Sandy took a full-time spot in the Miami rotation in 2019. In all of baseball, only 2023 AL Cy Young Award winner Gerrit Cole has pitched more innings over the last 5 seasons.

Without spending some serious money, you don’t replace those innings, and you don’t replace the quality.

While there is reason to hope Jesus Luzardo, Braxton Garrett and Eury Perez can step up in Sandy’s absence and continue their growth in 2024, there are questions as to how each of them will hold up following a season in which they all blew past their previous career highs in innings pitched. Perez, who won’t turn 21 until shortly after Opening Day, will again have his workload closely monitored.

After those 3, the rest of the rotation—and the club’s rotation depth—will consist of pitchers who have 1) Not yet sustained success at the major league level, 2) Have not yet proven they can stay healthy for a full season or 3) Fit into both of those categories.

As for the bullpen, Tanner Scott emerged as a reliable—and often dominating—9th-inning presence down the stretch in 2023. The club will look for another lefthander, Andrew Nardi, to repeat his terrific 2023 performance. A.J. Puk, who opened last season as the team’s closer, is bidding for a rotation spot this year after a streaky 2023. He’s one of countless other pitchers who could play a role on the Miami relief corps, a group that may be counted on for even more innings in 2024 without Alcantara atop the starting 5.

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After finishing 3rd in the NL East and winning the 2nd of 3 NL Wild Cards last season, 2/3 of respondents expect the Marlins to finish 4th (50 percent) or last (17 percent) in the division this year.

The Braves and Phillies are expected to compete at the top of the division. A large number of those who voted presumably expect the Marlins to fall behind the Mets this season as New York looks to bounce back from a 2023 season in which they were one of the biggest single-season disappointments in recent ML memory.

Some even anticipate Miami being leap-frogged by the rebuilding Nationals, who improved from 55 victories in 20223 to 71 last season and were basically a .500 team—and had a better record than the Marlins—from late June through the end of the season.

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In 31 NL seasons, the Marlins have reached the postseason 4 times, but never in consecutive years. 80 percent of our respondents expect that drought to continue in 2024.

The interesting thing to me is this:

At the start of Spring Training a season ago, there seemed to be 6 teams all but guaranteed to reach the NL playoffs—the Mets, Braves and Phillies out of the NL East, the Cardinals in the Central and the Dodgers and Padres in the West.

As it turned out, the Mets, Cardinals and Padres were historic disappointments, and that opened the door for the Brewers to win the Central and the Marlins and D-Backs to steal Wild Card spots.

At the start of the spring this year, the Braves, Phillies and Dodgers seem—to me at least—like the only really good bets to make the playoffs in the NL this season. The playoff race seems much more wide open, and that’s with several potential game-changing free agents still on the market. That’s another reason why I’d have liked to have seen the Marlins be more aggressive this winter. There’s a path to the playoffs for some teams many wouldn’t expect.

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Let’s face it. Many Marlins fans didn’t care who bought the team at the end of 2017. They just wanted a new owner.

You know the saying, “Be careful what you wish for”?

Bruce Sherman’s poor record of hiring (and firing) business side personnel has set the franchise back. That matters, even though most fans don’t care about it.

What fans care about is having an owner they are convinced is doing everything in his power to win. More than 2/3 of our respondents don’t believe that’s the case with Sherman as he begins his 7th season in charge.

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In our closest poll, 55 percent of you give the nod to Kim Ng, who Bruce Sherman didn’t trust to continue to build upon the progress that had been made on her watch. With decades of experience in various roles with multiple pedigreed organizations and the MLB central office, she came to the Marlins with a far more impressive resume and a wider network of relationships than new president of baseball operations Peter Bendix, whose primary selling point was having been a part of—but never at the helm of—a Rays baseball operations team that has done more with less than any team in the majors over the last decade and a half.

Bendix deserves time to put his stamp on the organization. Remember, Ng was general manager for 3 years, but had full autonomy for only 2 seasons following Sherman’s dismissal of Derek Jeter.

But Ng got the Marlins to the playoffs in 2023. And while her track record was not without flaws, she deserves credit for—among other things—the hiring of 2023 NL Manager of the Year Skip Schumaker (over the objection of many key people in the organization) and for the deadline acquisitions of Jake Burger and Josh Bell that were key to Miami’s run to the 2023 playoffs. To her credit, she also cut ties with some people Jeter had brought in who had not been successful in their roles.

I’ll give Bendix the benefit of the doubt on this offseason and say the Opening Day 2024 roster will be worse than the end-of-2023 group because he is handcuffed financially by his owner.

But while this is year one for the Boy Wonder, it’s year 7 for Sherman as he embarks upon his 2nd rebuild, and there must be urgency shown to a fan base that has yet to be shown any reason to give this owner the benefit of the doubt.

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Much has been reported about the Marlins’ willingness to trade anyone other than Eury Perez in the right deal. When it comes to potentially trading Jesus Luzardo or NL batting champion Luis Arraez, 90 percent of respondents say, “No!”

I say this: When will this team begin to play for today and not have virtually every move it makes be about tomorrow?

How have all those “building for the future” moves worked out to this point?

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4 percent is a fascinating number in this survey.

• 4 percent of you said you’d give the Marlins an A for their winter work.

• 4 percent of you said the 2024 Marlins are “significantly better” than the 2023 club.

• And 4 percent of you said you plan to attend more games in 2024 than in 2023.

Do with that information what you wish.

Meanwhile, nearly 2/3 of you (64 percent) said you expect to attend the same number of games in 2024 as in 2023. For some of you, I guess that number could be 81. For others, it could be zero.

32 percent of respondents report they expect to attend fewer games this season than last.

It will be interesting to follow Marlins attendance in 2024.

The Marlins averaged 14,356 a season ago, 29th out of 30 ML clubs ahead of only the Athletics, but easily a Sherman-era high.

If you take away the 3 games in which loanDepot park was overrun by Yankees fans, that per game average drops by more than 1,200. And the Yanks won’t be coming to town this season.

Then there’s Opening Day, which is an automatic sellout in other markets and at least had a respectable crowd in Miami last year because the Mets were in town. This year, it’s the Pirates, and the Marlins still have not opened up tickets on the Vista Level or down the lines on the Legends Level. That tells you 2 things: 1) If you want to make early plans to attend the season opener, the club will force you to purchase more expensive lower-level tickets whether you want to or not and 2) They haven’t sold enough of those lower-level tickets to feel the need to make cheaper seats available.

That doesn’t bode well.

And if the Marlins are not in playoff contention, well, we’ve all seen this movie before.

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