The Marlins Are Chasing (History)

The Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn on September 24, 1957. They won 2-0 behind rookie Danny McDevitt, who scattered five singles and never let the Pirates get a runner past second base. They’d finish the season on the road, never to return. Five days after their season ended, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in human history. With the Braves and Yankees in the midst of a seven-game thriller of a World Series, the 23-inch sphere transmitted adorable beeps down to earth until its batteries died three weeks later, so frightening the public in this country that the government established NASA and embarked on a 12-year sprint to put American boots on the moon. Among other things, the Apollo astronauts studied to become geologists so that they could recognize and bring home samples that would teach us more about the history and composition of both the moon and the earth. They also installed reflective panels for a laser ranging experiment that revealed the moon is moving away from the earth at the rate of 3.8 centimeters per year.

In 1918, before they were in Los Angeles or even officially called the Dodgers, the Brooklyn Robins earned just 212 walks in 126 games for a walk rate of 4.6%. Shortstop Ollie O’Mara managed just seven walks in 450 plate appearances. Since the beginning of the modern era in 1903, that team’s 67 BB%+ is the lowest in AL/NL history. Only one other team, the 1957 Kansas City Athletics, has finished a season below 70. Like the Dodgers, the Athletics would drift away from Kansas City. Like the moon, they would keep on drifting.

The Marlins are running a 5.7% walk rate, worst in baseball this year. Their 67 BB%+ also puts them second from the bottom since 1903, snugly between those Dodgers and Athletics teams. When I started writing this article, they were at the very bottom, but in an uncharacteristic fit of ecstatic restraint, they picked up three whole walks on Monday. It was their 27th game this season with at least three walks. Every other team in baseball has had at least 40 such games. The Marlins have gone without a walk 18 different times. That’s twice as many zero-walk games as 28 of the other 29 teams. In all, the Marlins have walked 164 times in 79 games. Since 1901, only 22 teams have walked less over their first 79 games. Every single one of those teams played more than 100 years ago.

The reason for Miami’s inability to ambulate, at least in a baseball sense, is very simple. Since Sports Info Solutions started tracking these things in 2002, the 2024 Marlins trail only the 2019 Tigers as the most chase-happy team ever recorded. (Once again, they were in first when I pitched this article, and I am taking their ever-so-slightly improved patience very personally.) SIS has those Tigers at 34.3% and this year’s Marlins at 34.0%, while Statcast has the two at 35% and 34.4%, respectively. In all likelihood, the Marlins will spend the rest of the season locked in a very breezy bullfight with that 2019 Detroit team.

The interesting thing is that if you head over to our plate discipline leaderboard and sort by O-Swing%, you won’t find any Marlins at the top until you start reducing the number of plate appearances required to qualify. Even if you drop all the way to 100 PAs, you’ll see that Nick Gordon is the only Marlin in the top 10, and he ranks seventh on the team in PAs. In other words, they’re not at the top because they’ve got a couple players wrecking the curve. They’re at the top because their roster is packed from stem to stern with players with absolutely no discipline at the plate. This year, the league as a whole has a chase rate of 28.2%. Of the 20 different players who have come to the plate for Miami, 17 have a chase rate above 28.2%. Nine of them are above 36% and four of them are above 40%. If you put the 2024 Marlins through the Stanford marshmallow experiment, you wouldn’t even get a chance to set the marshmallow down on the table. They’d scarf it down along with half your arm, then check to see if they could eat the table too.

The three Marlins with a below-average chase rate — Dane Myers, Tristan Gray, and Xavier Edwards — have combined for 82 of Miami’s 2,869 total plate appearances. In other words, this season Miami has sent a guy with a below-average chase rate to the plate more than 97% of the time. That’s one way to challenge for a record.

In 2023, the Marlins ran the 10th-highest chase rate in baseball. How did they get from there to here? If you look at the moves they made during the offseason, you might honestly come away with the impression that their goal was to break this record. They lost Jorge Soler, Jacob Stallings, and Yuli Gurriel in free agency, non-tendered Garrett Hampson, and traded Jon Berti. If you rank the 2023 Marlins by walk rate, those players took up five of the top seven spots. That’s 40% of the team’s walks gone.

To replace them, the Marlins added Christian Bethancourt’s 3.7% career walk rate, Tim Anderson’s 3.8% rate, Gordon’s 4.3% rate, Vidal Bruján’s 6.3% rate, and Emmanuel Rivera’s 7.2% rate. If you sort our career plate discipline leaderboard by chase rate, Bethancourt ranks fourth among all qualified players, ever. Anderson ranks 24th (Avisaíl García, who was already on the team, ranks 18th). It’s like the Marlins were trying to reenact the Recreate Him in the Aggregate scene from Moneyball, but the Him they were talking about was a cat chasing a laser pointer.

Still, those moves on their own wouldn’t have been enough to put the team in contention for a record. Whether by coincidence or because playing in Miami does something to your ability to recognize a pitch, several Marlins are putting up career-worst plate discipline numbers. Jake Burger and García are running career-low walk rates. Gordon, Rivera, and Bethancourt (who was recently DFA’d) are running career-high chase rates. Josh Bell, Jesús Sánchez, and Nick Fortes are putting up career-worst numbers in both categories. It may sound like I’ve done some cherry-picking here. After all, if you pick any two categories, you’d expect just about every team to have at least a few players who are running a career high or low in one or the other. But I haven’t done any cherry-picking. Bruján, whose 29.1% chase rate would rank in the 42nd percentile if he had enough PAs to qualify, is the only player running a career-best rate in either category. Those other eight players have taken just over half of the team’s PAs this season, while Anderson, Chisholm, and De La Cruz have been their normal, swing-happy selves.

During the offseason, the team promoted John Mabry from assistant hitting coach to hitting coach. Over the course of his 14-year career, Mabry ran a 7.3% walk rate, giving him a BB%+ of 84. Over the last five years of his career, the only portion where we have pitch-level data, he ran a 21.3% chase rate, right around the league average. From 2013 to 2018, when Mabry was an assistant hitting coach with the Cardinals, the team ran an 8.4% walk rate, exactly the league average. Their 27.7% chase rate was well below the league average, ranking all the way down at 21st. From 2020 to 2022, the years that Mabry filled the same role in Kansas City, the Royals ran the majors’ second-lowest walk rate at 7.4%, and the sixth-highest chase rate at 30.2%. In other words, Mabry hasn’t necessarily been a shining beacon of patience in either his playing days or his coaching days, but it would be extremely unfair to pin all of this on him. The most damning thing I can say about him is that while I was researching this article, I went looking for stories and quotes about the team’s plate discipline, and I couldn’t find anything at all. If the Marlins are concerned about their inability to stop swinging at slop, they’re keeping it to themselves, though I imagine they’re less concerned about their walk rate specifically than about the fact that their 78 wRC+ ranks 29th in baseball.

If this team has an avatar, it has to be Gordon. He’s not only Miami’s most aggressive hitter, but he’s truly having an astounding season. Gordon came into the year with a 38.7% career chase rate, but he’s in an entirely new galaxy this season. He’s currently running a 44.8% chase rate, which is why his Statcast slider looks like this:

Gordon’s 3.5% walk rate is, amazingly, actually an improvement over 2023, when he put up 1.1% rate over 93 PAs. If you run a search for Plate X — the horizontal location of a pitch — you’ll find that for nearly 80% of players, their average swing comes on a pitch that’s within one inch of the very center of home plate. But Gordon simply can’t lay off the outside pitch. The average pitch the left-hander swings at is -.21 feet from the center of home plate. I know that sounds small; it’s only 2.52 inches. But that’s closer to the right-handed batter’s box than any player baseball. In fact, it’s so far toward the third base side that even if you drop the PA requirement, Gordon still ranks 11th, even though he’s seen almost as many pitches as the 10 players ahead of him combined.

As you might have heard, Gordon doesn’t believe the moon is real. No, I’m not joking. Nick Gordon doesn’t believe that the moon is real. Why doesn’t he believe in the moon? Gordon is all too happy to explain. “The moon is way too close, bro,” he told reporters. “It’s way too close.” This is when it all starts to make sense. Of course Gordon thinks the moon is too close. He makes his living largely by flailing at spheres that are much farther away than he thinks they are. Maybe he’ll be comforted to know that the moon, much like the changeups he can’t resist, is getting farther away all the time.

But to put this all on Gordon or any one player would be doing a disservice to the roster that the Marlins have assembled. They are united in a common cause, and they have been wildly successful no matter how you dice the numbers. They lead the league in chase rate against both righties and lefties, at home and away, with the bases empty and with runners in scoring position. They chase the most against sinkers, cutters, changeups, splitters, sliders, and curveballs. Only 15 teams have even seen a knuckleball this season, but the Marlins lead them in chase rate too. If you’d prefer to break things down by Statcast’s attack zones, they swing the most against pitches in the shadow zone, the chase zone, and the waste zone. The only location where they’re not in first place? The heart of the plate.