Are they due? And does any of this matter?
“Make your boss’s job easier and you’ll be valuable and you will have more opportunities — that worked for me,” said Peter Bendix, President of Baseball Operations for the Miami Marlins. That was eight months ago in an interview on MLB Network.
That was soon after inherting a roster that was the #2 Wild Card in 2023, a roster that he either viewed as being unsustainable or costing too much ($134.9 million). Bendix spent the next seven months or so gutting the roster out of a combination of perceived necessity and lack of depth. Losing aces Sandy Alcantara and Eury Perez to season-ending arm injuries foreshadowed tough sledding in the hypercompetitive NL East, and so it looks like the plan was just to go full tank and wait for both of them to return healthy.
Of course, these are the Marlins, and it seems like they’re always rebuilding, so it’s hard to see if there’s much of a plan beyond, “Spend as little as possible but still compete in an tough division a la the Rays.” That’s why ownership hired a guy from the Rays. I don’t know how he’s made his boss’s job easier, but for Bendix’s generation of baseball exec, gutting a roster and setting the team state to rebuild is akin to a heroin addiction.
Bendix brought in Gabe Kapler to be the assistant general manager as one of the big bright spots on his resume has been player development, specifically with the Dodgers. There’s a nonzero chance he takes over as the team’s manager next season, too, after current manager Skip Schumacher requested he be let out of his option for 2025. I don’t know how Gabe Kapler makes his boss’s job easier — he has yet to demonstrate that in two stops as manager and even in LA he was involved in a bad bit of news at the development level.
So, I’m forced to conclude that “Make your boss’s job easier” means “Make your boss’s job (of making money) easier,” because clawing money back from payroll is the fastest way to transfer more into the boss’s pocket.
In any case, Bendix has been given the full-on teardown that Farhan Zaidi was never permitted and it seems like it’s one of those things that the current generation of front office types demand in order to establish their program. The ability to trade present talent for future value has genuine utility, even if it’s anti-customer/fan. We’ll see how it pans out in the future — those lottery tickets need to have been properly scouted. But for now, this is a noncompetitive team that hasn’t got much talent.
That’s an irrelevant point for the Giants. They’re neither good nor bad and that might be enough of an equalizer. They couldn’t sweep the Chicago White Sox at home. Maybe they’ll sweep the Marlins, who haven’t won a series since August 27th, but maybe they won’t. And it won’t really matter, since the Giants aren’t going to the playoffs this year and it’ll be another long September setting up another chaotic offseason wherein a decent chunk of the roster will need to be refreshed with pricey free agents and at the end of the day the team will still be missing one big bat in the middle of the lineup.
They are mostly out of young players to tryout in the season’s final month, so, to me, it’s all about seeing what Grant McCray, Tyler Fitzgerald, and Heliot Ramos can do when nothing is on the line except how coaches and management perceive them. Is Patrick Bailey’s bat permanently dead? Can the Giants avoid blowing out any elbows on an overworked pitching staff? Can Bob Melvin out-manage Skip Schumacher?
The stakes have never been lower.
Series details
Who: Miami Marlins vs. San Francisco Giants
Where: Oracle Park, San Francisco, California
When: Friday (7:15pm PT), Saturday (6:05pm PT), Sunday (1:05pm PT)
National broadcasts: MLB Network simulcast (Friday)
Projected starters
Friday: Adam Oller vs. Blake Snell
Saturday: Edward Cabrera vs. TBD
Sunday: TBD vs. Logan Webb
Where they stand
Marlins, 49-85 (5th in NLE, -24.0 WC), 508 RS / 694 RA | Last 10 games: 3-7
Giants, 67-68 (4th in NLW, -6.5 WC), 576 RS / 595 RA | Last 10 games: 5-5
Marlins to watch
Jake Burger: The corner infielder slugger was one of the “go for it” moves the Marlins made at last year’s deadline who helped them get into the postseason with 9 home runs in 53 games on a triple slash of .303/.355/.505.
Through May 27th, he had been mostly a flop on this season: .189/.227/.311; but, since May 28th, in 76 games (328 PA) he’s really turned his whole season around with a line of .276/.342/.539 (.880 OPS) — 21 HR, 13 2B, 1 3B, 90:21 K:BB. 10 of those home runs have come here in August on a line of .294/.381/.637 (1.019 OPS). He’s doing most of his damage on the road, too. His OPS away from Miami is .876 (.683 at home). He’s like best-case scenario J.D. Davis that the Giants never saw.
Otto Lopez: He was briefly a Giant this season, but waived and claimed by the Marlins. In 90 games (324 PA), the second baseman has hit just .250/.293/.337, but here in August, he’s at .302/.368/.396. Very little power this month (.094 ISO), but he’s been a tough out, walking 9.4% of the time and striking out just 17.9%.
Edward Cabrera: In two career starts against the Giants (one this year, one last year), he has a 2.25 ERA in 12 IP 18 K 3 BB. He struck out 10 Giants back in April in a game the Giants eventually won (Jung Hoo Lee went 2-for-4). But he’s never faced the Giants at Oracle.
Giants to watch
Grant McCray: Admittedly, Miami’s starting pitching has a bit more experience than the lineup and bullpen, and so McCray wouldn’t be going up against a caliber of player he’d have seen in the minor leagues recently. Still, if the Giants are trying to develop first division talent, then those players will need to do well against second division talent. He homered in game one of the Brewers series but followed that game up with an 0-for-7 with 4 strikeouts.
Tyler Fitzgerald: He hasn’t homered in over two weeks, and since that last home run he’s hit just .213/.269/.234 (52 PA). Just a cold streak, the kind all hitters go through, or evidence that the league has firmed up their book on him? The Marlins are tied with the Angels in terms of pitching staff value and that 7.2 fWAR is just 28th in MLB.
Heliot Ramos: His last 10 games: .297/.357/.622 with 3 home runs and 3 doubles. This includes the 0-for-4 with 3 strikeouts he had yesterday in Milwaukee. He’s not going to break the Giants’ “consecutive seasons without a 30 HR hitter” streak, but he might be in position to get to 25?