2023 ZiPS Projections: Miami Marlins

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Miami Marlins.

Batters

Well, I guess we’re getting the bad news out of the way first! There is a lot to like about the Miami Marlins’ roster and almost none of it is contained in this section. I say almost none because Jazz Chisholm Jr. is a very talented player who is a blast to watch when he’s healthy and things are going well. Any pitch he connects with has the potential to be the perfect blend of velocity and launch angle. He combines that offensive ability with decent defense at second base, below-average glove work at short that still avoids being disastrous, and speed that will hopefully remain fully intact in 2023. And while you’ll notice Javier Báez on his comp list, his contact skills are less bleak and he’s nowhere near as over-aggressive.

If Chisholm is the Marlins’ Thelonious Monk, the rest of the lineup is, well, your neighbor’s tone-deaf 10-year-old son who got a guitar for Christmas and suddenly discovered Korn. There’s just no realistic scenario in which the offense is a significant plus for the team. The Fish’s third-best projected hitter is an over-30 catcher who had a .584 OPS last year. Using the ZiPS plate appearances, only four players in the organization project to have a 5% chance of a 4-WAR season in 2023. That’s fewer than teams like the Rockies and Pirates. What makes this especially unforgivable is that the Marlins intend to contend with this team now. There’s nothing wrong with a contender adding Jean Segura, but the team needs so much more than him; he’s not the finishing piece in an otherwise playoff-worthy lineup here. There’s no one in the organization who projects to be a difference-maker in the years before the pitching gets expensive, meaning that there’s no one in the organization who projects to be a difference-maker before Miami trades its pitchers to larger-market teams for prospects.

At some point, if the Marlins are actually serious about making the playoffs, they’re going to have to spend significant money in free agency, because they’re already running out of time to develop their own Aaron Judge or Mike Trout to come save the day. If they don’t, sneaking into an expanded playoff field with a .500 record because a pandemic disrupted the world will be their high-water mark. And no, swapping pitchers for hitters isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card. Good teams need that depth because pitchers break!

Pitchers

Whew, we got the bad stuff out of the way. What makes the offense so frustrating to an outsider like me is that there are just so many compelling pitchers here. On some level, it would be easier if the pitching was as bleak as the offense, because then you could just say “ha ha, 52-110” and move on with your day. Sandy Alcantara is the closest thing to a classic workhorse ace as exists in 2020s baseball and the Marlins have him at a reasonable cost for as many as five more seasons. Thanks to his projected innings, he’s the current WAR leader in ZiPS among pitchers.

Pablo López is the pitcher who comes up the most in trade discussions, and I’m scared that the Marlins will trade for hitting instead of simply using all that shared revenue money to sign someone and keep their no. 2 starter. There are a lot of talented pitchers on the roster, but a lot of those talented pitchers have lengthy injury histories. Giving up López for an equivalent hitter just rearranges the deck chairs and rolls the dice on the rest of the staff. There’s a ton of upside in literally all of Jesús Luzardo, Max Meyer, Eury Pérez, Trevor Rogers, and Sixto Sánchez, but I don’t relish trying to find 180 extra innings from that group. I think you have to hang onto López and only start talking trades once you’re dealing from an actual, rather than speculative, strength. For all the live young arms in the organization and the 400 combined innings from Alcantara and López, Miami’s rotation still only ranked 12th in the majors in WAR last season. The excess pitching does not yet exist.

The bullpen isn’t quite as explosive as the rotation, but it’ll be strengthened in the long-term by whichever of the team’s live young arms don’t quite work out as starters. ZiPS especially likes Dylan Floro and Nic Enright, and hard-throwing lefty Tanner Scott is just unhittable enough that he can survive with that walk rate. The rest of the bullpen looks merely adequate, but between a few Triple-A pitchers and the players who stay healthy but don’t make the rotation, there should be an impressive amount of depth available. The Marlins ought to beat their disappointing 4.15 relief ERA from 2022.

The Marlins look like a .500 team, but an oddly configured one, with a playoff-ready pitching staff and a first-pick-of-the-draft-ready lineup. Hopefully ownership will someday give general manager Kim Ng enough cash to help the team fix the latter without ruining the former.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2023 due to injury, and players who were released in 2022. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Death Dixieland Bubblegum Ska-Funk band, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.22, above 2022’s level of offense but lower than other years. Pitchers who appear to have a fairly definite change in the majors from start-to-relief or vice-versa from these projections will receive reconfigured updates in the spring.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by flaws in the physical reality of the universe or by skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter.