Christian Yelich and Your 2019 Miami Marlins Would Still Finish in Last Place
Earlier this week, the Athletic’s Marc Carig wrote this really good piece taking a look at what the 2019 Miami Marlins might look like if they still had all the great players the franchise has (stupidly) traded away in the last few years. We did a similar thing in 2018, but the would-be 2019 Marlins look even better today than they did then.
Under two (cheap, terrible) owners, the Marlins have stripped themselves to the studs (unfortunately, not the good kind) in an effort to ‘rebuild’ but really to save money. They’ve dealt the last two NL MVP’s and a plethora of All-Stars, top prospects, up and comers, and useful veterans.
The current team is terrible, not just the worst in baseball, but so bad that we argued in Spring Training that a team made up entirely of non-roster invitees could beat them. And we recently wrote a piece trying to come up with creative ways to possibly make them worse. It wasn’t easy.
In his article, Carig argues that if the Marlins had simply held on to the talent they had, they’d be a ‘powerhouse,’ on pace for 102 wins this year. It’s a compelling tale- a team trotting out Christian Yelich, Giancarlo Stanton, and Marcell Ozuna in the outfield and Luis Castillo, Domingo German, Chris Paddack, Nathan Eovaldi, Anthony DeSclafani and Trevor Williams in the starting rotation certainly sounds good, and conventional wisdom says Carig is right about the team being great, but here’s the thing….
Marc Carig is wrong. Even with all that talent, the 2019 Miami Marlins would finish in last place. Full Stop. Fact.
It’s true! I know it’s surprising, but it’s true. I ran the simulation myself in Out of the Park Baseball 2020, the premier MLB simulator and possibly best game in the world. In fact, I was so surprised to see the rejuvenated Marlins finish last that I ran the sim twice and again, the Best Case Scenario 2019 Marlins were abysmal.
Here at OTBB, we have a lot of experience with OOTP– from taking over and fixing crappy real life teams to reorganizing the entire MLB alphabetically just to see which letter would be best – so it wasn’t too hard to undo the Marlins’ recent terrible decisions and give them back all the talented players they traded away.
Here’s the lineup I came up with:
And the pitching staff:
It’s not bad! In fact, it’s pretty good. That’s not the deepest lineup in baseball but that outfield is pretty awesome and the pitching staff looks like it can hold it’s own. It’s definitely good enough to convince knowledgeable baseball writer Marc Carig that 102 wins is realistic.
After adding Dee Gordon and J.T. Realmuto, there’s only three current Marlins in this hybrid, best case starting lineup. You could plausibly make a case for Derek Dietrich finding his way into the lineup fairly often, too.
But none of it mattered. In the first sim I ran, the Marlins finished 67-95. Yelich hit .228 with 23 bombs. Stanton slugged 46 homers but hit just .235. Gordon spent most of the season on the DL. Paddack, Castillo, and Williams were pretty good, but the rest of the pitching staff was a disaster- even Caleb Smith, the Marlins lone current pitcher of note.
Now, I trust OOTP, but this didn’t add up. .228 from Yelich seemed like an awful lot of regression (and yes, I updated the game so it knew about everyone’s current stats up to 5/29/19, even though I started the season over at Opening Day). And .228 from Yelich would be a career low by leaps and bounds, so I decided to try again.
I remade the exact same roster, unwinding all the trades the team made and sending all the players the Marlins got- like Starlin Castro, Lewis Brinson, Sixto Sanchez, and Sandy Alcantara– back where they’d come from. I ran the whole sim again.
71-91. Still last place.
This year, Gordon played the whole season and hit .271 with 20 steals. Stanton hit 50 bombs and batted .238. Yelich hit 34 bombs and batted .287, follwing up his real-life 2018 MVP season with a 6.1 WAR year. Ozuna hit .242 with 22 homers in this return to Miami- still not great, but reasonable. Even Realmuto hit 16 homers.
On the other side of things, German posted a 3.23 ERA, but he was the only passable pitcher. Marlins Chris Paddack is apparently not nearly as good as the Padres version, posting a 5-10 record and a 4.59 ERA. Eovaldi, Williams, Smith, and Castillo were not good at all.
71-91. 20 games under .500, despite that incredible outfield. The Marlins are apparently such a swirling morass of baseball ineptitude that even having good players can’t make them a good team.
In reality, I think it was the lack of depth that doomed them. Sure, having Stanton, Ozuna, and Yelich in the outfield is great, but the bottom of the lineup is so bad that it torpedoes the whole offense- in both sims, the Marlins were the worst in the NL.
Likewise, the names in the starting staff are enticing, but in reality Eovaldi and Williams are mid-rotation guys and there’s no track record to imply that Paddack, Smith, and German can be as good as their early season real life results indicate.
It’s a tempting team but it’s fools gold. Sadly for Marlins fans, the universe has decided that 2019 is not Miami’s year, no matter who they trot out there.
-Max Frankel
