The Marlins Could Be Tanking the Right Way
(Photo: Corn Farmer)
There has been considerable handwringing this offseason about the way the new Marlins ownership group has gone about dismantling any hopes of a competitive club the near future. The front office inherited a borderline playoff contender — one featuring the reigning NL MVP, as well as multiple young, talented, and cost-controlled players — and made no attempt to build a winner in what should be a wide-open Wild Card race in 2018 as well as a wide-open National League East at the start of the following season.
That the Marlins chose a different path is unfortunate for baseball and unfortunate for long-suffering Marlins fans — not to mention the potential Marlins fans who could have been cultivated with a commitment to winning in the long term.
Now that it’s clear that the Marlins have chosen not to field a competitive team in the near term, it is time to examine their current options with J.T. Realmuto and Christian Yelich and begin to analyze their decisions up to this point. As Dave Cameron noted in the aftermath of the Giancarlo Stanton trade to the Yankees, the Marlins did okay with their market value salary dumps.
From Cameron’s piece:
But for how easy it has been to make fun of the Marlins over the years, I think we should acknowledge that their two salary-dump trades so far haven’t been terrible baseball trades. Dee Gordon was moved for some legitimate prospects, and Stanton brought back at least one guy who could turn into something special. The Marlins are dumping salary, but these moves haven’t been just straight salary dumps.
We could perhaps criticize the Marlins for not trying to get better prospects in the Gordon deal, perhaps by offering to offset some of his guaranteed money, but that is a small misstep rather than a major miscalculation. The way in which the Giancarlo Stanton trade unfolded suggests the team has pursued value. Consider: they agreed to assume some of the burden of Stanton’s contract, and that was after Stanton had nullified a (presumably superior) deal with the Cardinals. Any quibbles about the specific trades are minor. The philosophy that has led to their fire sale is the issue. Once choosing that path, however, the Marlins have generally behaved reasonably.
Then, of course, the Marlins traded away Marcell Ozuna for Sandy Alcantara, Daniel Castano, Zac Gallen, and Magneuris Sierra. While I typically set a low bar for the Marlins — and am surely not the only one to do so — they also didn’t insist on sending a bad contract to St. Louis in exchange for a lesser return. If Alcantara becomes an All-Star, Sierra turns into Ender Inciarte, and Gallen pitches at the end of the rotation, this trade will look great for the Marlins. If, however, Alcantara becomes a middle reliever, Sierra turns into Terrance Gore, and Gallen fails to stick in the big leagues, the trade is going to end up a bad one. But that’s also sort of true with most trades of this nature. The Marlins took the best deal they believed they could get for a player under control for just two more seasons.
If you include trade deadline additions Merandy Gonzalez and Brayan Hernandez, plus top draft picks Brian Miller and Trevor Rogers, the Marlins have acquired roughly 10 of their top-15 prospects in the last few months. The system wasn’t good before, but it is now a lot better than it was, and it has the potential of being even better in short order by trading the two players of interest remaining on the roster.
Over at The Athletic, Ken Rosenthal urges the Marlins to commit to a full rebuild by trading Realmuto and Yelich. If the Marlins are going to try and win at any time in the next few years, it is hard to argue with Rosenthal’s thesis, and the Marlins appear willing to continue performing deals like the Ozuna one, getting the best package possible.
From Rosenthal’s piece:
Both Yelich and Realmuto are young, affordable and productive — baseball’s new Triple Crown. The Marlins, rival clubs say, want massive packages for each. They should want massive packages. Their primary motivation is not to cut payroll, as it was in the Gordon and Stanton trades. They do not want to dilute their returns by attaching third baseman Martin Prado, second baseman Starlin Castro or any other high-salaried player to Yelich or Realmuto, sources say. No, the Marlins want the best prospects they can acquire; one rival executive says that for Yelich they are trying to beat what the White Sox obtained from the Boston Red Sox for Sale.
With regard to rebuilding — or tanking, if you want to use the more loaded term — the two clearest recent examples are surely the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs, also the last two World Series winners. Ahead of the 2012 season, both clubs hired a new architect for their respective organization: Jeff Luhnow in the Astros’ case and Theo Epstein in the Cubs’. The rebuilds for each org were complete by 2015. Those teams are the model, but that model is also difficult to reproduce. Houston went bare bones with awful teams, but their draft picks played key roles in their turnaround. The Cubs, meanwhile, took a team with a top-five payroll and ended up near the bottom-third before once again splurging on high-priced free agents to take them to the top.
In his piece, Rosenthal notes how the Cubs retained Anthony Rizzo and the Astros kept Jose Altuve through the rebuilding process — a road map, perhaps, should the Marlins choose not to move Yelich. Those examples, though, aren’t really aren’t quite the same. Both of those players signed extensions during the 2013 season, essentially a year and a half into the rebuild; both players were a greater distance from free agency (six-and-a-half years for Altuve, eight years for Rizzo) after the contracts; and both players weren’t all that good at the time of the contract.
J.T. Realmuto and Christian Yelich, meanwhile, are good right now. Realmuto is a free agent after 2020 with Yelich gone after 2022. If the Marlins are going to be good in 2020, it is not because they kept Realmuto and Yelich to build around. It will be because they obtained a mass of good, young players to replace them all over the diamond, got lucky on a few guys, and used their payroll flexibility to find free agents to push the club over the top.
Regardless, putting a good team on the field by 2020 is a bit aggressive. Expecting to win by 2020 with J.T. Realmuto and Christian Yelich but without significant outlays of cash on free agents is probably a pipe dream. The Astros and Cubs did nearly everything right and had a ton of luck. They made the playoffs in Year No. 4 of their new administrations. The Astros/Cubs method is not a guarantee of success, and multiple franchises are in the middle of their own rebuilds. It is near impossible for the Atlanta Braves, Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, Milwaukee Brewers, Philadelphia Phillies, and San Diego Padres to all be as successful as the Astros and Cubs. It takes incredible planning and a decent amount of good fortune to pull it off.
The Marlins aren’t going to fool fans, old or new, into believing the current team is a contender or that the Marlins are acting in good faith by keeping Realmuto and Yelich around. Derek Jeter and the Marlins might be fooling themselves if they think they can rebuild quickly with their current farm system and major-league roster. If the Marlins want fans to come to the park, they need to provide a winner. They had a window to invest in their current roster and see what came of it. They opted against that route, however. Now Realmuto and Yelich are surrounded by a team unlikely to win in the near term. Their greatest value to the Marlins is not as the stars of a team winning 70-75 games over the next few years. Their greatest value is as trade chips to try to bring a sustained winner to the fans of Miami, something no ownership group has tried there since the franchise began 25 years ago.
Craig Edwards can be found on twitter @craigjedwards.
they could be, but they would only ‘seem to be’ tanking the right way after these contemplated trades actually happen.
I think the cause for optimism for “tanking the right way” is that they didn’t try to attach any bad contracts to Ozuna on his way out the door. They could have easily done that and gotten less of a prospect return.
That doesn’t mean they won’t try to do that in the future, but it does say something.
Ha! Given the tiny return, it seems like they should have included Prado. It would have made more sense.
@Lee – please show your work (math) of calling that a “tiny return” for Ozuna. Working through the math of (1) projections for Ozuna from Steamer/ZiPS, (2) Ozuna’s expected arb salaries for his remaining two years of team control, and (3) the prospect rankings for the return from sources such as Longenhagen or MLB.com, and the math of the return for Ozuna basically adds up (particularly if we make sure to use the same $ per WAR in prospect value charts that we use for valuing Ozuna).
There is a fair criticism – expressed by Dave Cameron, as just one example – from those who are skeptical of scouts’ rankings of Alcantara and Sierra. Some scouts and prospect rankers see the upside from tools (elite velocity and speed, respectively), while Cameron sees low floors due to concerns about command/control and hitting ability, respectively.
Some of the criticism, however – and I suspect that yours may be in this category – is based on refusing to accept that a player with only two remaining years of team control at high-ish arb salaries only has so much trade value, and similarly refusing to accept that Ozuna’s not going to net a trade return based on another team assuming that his career year in 2017 (4.8 fWAR) is a new baseline expectation for him.
keep in mind that prospects are just that. And most don’t turn into anything. And if they do, it is usually years down the line. And to be good, you need a lot of good players. Which means that a lot of these prospects have to hit. Good luck.
You could almost say the same about adding FA’s to a middling team. Most FA’s aren’t worth their contracts and they wreck your payroll. Then you have to trade your good incumbents later at lower trade value when you find out you’re still in the middle and have maxed out your payroll capacity. Good luck.
Hopefully they don’t pair one of the two with chen or other dead money for mediocre prospect. They needed to get rid of stantons salary but now they need to do everything to maximize returns.
If they package one of the two with dead money it would be a really bad sign for the future.
This is what I would worry about if I was a Marlins fan. Chen and Prado actually might not have so much negative value if they can come back and play decently, and they could dump the contracts without giving up value.
Based on the Ozuna trade, I actually am starting to think that is what Jeter and Company’s plan is, which would mean that they are trying to do the right thing post-Stanton trade (which doesn’t mean they’ll do it well…)
Prado had been a productive and versatile big leaguer from both 2009 through 2016 before dealing with injuries last season, and is signed to an eminently reasonable contact.
Every single suggestion that the Marlins would compromise their prospect return from key assets in order to sell low on Prado (who could very well bring back an interesting piece at the deadline, should he return to his precious level of performance) has always been absurd.
They will never win or draw fans until they demolish that hideous outfield statue.
Am I the only one who thinks that the Marlins are going to almost certainly trade Yelich before Spring Training? He is only going to get more expensive and with less team control (and more injury risk) the longer they wait.
Add to that the leaked plans that Jeter & Company were circulating to investors about targeting $90 million for the opening day payroll, which they almost certainly won’t reach unless they dump Yelich and Ziegler, and I think when the time comes they’re going to stop holding out and sell.
And yes, I know the White Sox held out until someone meets their price but they were under no desire to slash payroll. I think whoever has the high bid (hopefully from prospects and not salary relief, as Craig notes) on Yelich on February 10th is going to get him.
The first part applies to Realmuto too, who just had a really good framing season too. But they could theoretically hold onto his contract.
Everyone knows both will be traded.
A) The Marlins really aren’t trying to “slash payroll” anymore. The payroll has been slashed.
B) Even if they were, trading Yelich’s $7m salary in no way helps them to slash payroll – if they dump someone, it’ll be Castro.
C) He’s under team control through 2022, and could very well be part of the next good Marlins team.
The fact that some people don’t understand why a team with Rays revenue is behaving like a team with Rays revenue doesn’t suddenly mean that a leadership team who paid the Yankees $30m and took on Castro’s salary in order to snag a potential stud in Jorge Guzman is going to sell a young, cost-controlled star for pennies on the dollar.
Wouldn’t Bour be another Marlin with trade value? Last year batted 0.289/0.366/0.536 with 25HR. This year projected 0.266/0.345/0.482 and 27HR (Steamer).
I probably should’ve mentioned Bour, though I don’t think his value is anywhere near the level of Yelich or Realmuto.
I agree with Craig.
Bour has 3 years of team control at arb salaries, but he also has a profile that gets paid relatively well compared to WAR in arbitration (power-hitting 1B). There are also still a couple non-Hosmer LH hitting 1B still available in free agency (Logan Morrison and Duda) with the potential that one or both could be available on relatively team-friendly terms due to supply/demand dynamics.
So, while Bour should have some trade value, I think his value relative to Yelich and Realmuto is lower – due to supply/demand dynamics – even beyond the fact that Bour is both older and not as good of a player. I could see Bour being a player who might end up having the most trade value through an in-season deal if a contender suffers a serious injury at 1B or DH.
Straily has big time value.
Dontrelle Willis has big time value too.
Corner OF are not going to command huge packages in the trade market, unless they are particularly special players. Why give up two jewel prospects to pay Yelich 10M a year, when Cain can approximate a lot of his value for 15-18M per. I like Yelich a lot and I recognize he has another level to reach, but in this age of platooning and roster versatility, it’s just not that hard a position to eek production out of.
Waiting until the trade deadline frees them from competing with the supply of free agents and they can prey upon contenders who are desperate to improve their team without any other avenue to turn to.
But yelich isn’t a corner of, he plays center for miami. He isn’t great but an average cf with a 115-120 wrc+ is worth a lot especially when he is young and under control.
Your analysis shows that Yelich would provide 5M-8M of surplus per year. That’s worth a few nice prospects.
That argument has to ignore that Yelich just turned 26 2018 and that Cain will turn 32 in April 2018.
It’s not just a system such as Steamer projecting 0.7 more fWAR for Yelich than Cain in 2018. A reasonable baseline expectation has to be for that gap in Yelich’s favor to grow wider in every subsequent year.
Btw the ozuna deal wasn’t bad. It wasn’t a haul like the torres chapman deal but the time of plus 50m surplus value deals is likely over.
After my math ozuna was worth around plus 35 m and the return is worth like 30 or so.ok but not great trade.
Really? I see it as very doubtful that any of the prospects will amount to anything. Ozuna is the best LF in the game.
Eric gave the two guys a 50 and according to this article https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/valuing-the-2017-top-100-prospects/ a 50 hitter is worth 20m and a 50 pitcher like 15m. The two 40s also might be worth like 7m combined or so.
So the package might be even worth 40m.
Of course both alcantara and sierra have some warts and might be questionable lower end 50s but the package isn’t terrible.
I’d think of his as the 5th-best corner outfielder (Stanton, Harper, Judge, and Betts ahead of him). He gets bumped down to 6th if Yelich moves back to left. He’s about the same level as Conforto and JD Martinez, and Hoskins if they can actually play the outfield. Some might also put Justin Upton and Yoenis Cespedes up there too, although I wouldn’t.
The most common objection to the Ozuna deal is that the prospects weren’t really FV50s.
I think that he probably should have brought back an FV55 and an FV50, but there isn’t much of a market for corner outfielders right now.
“They weren’t really 50s” per the people who thought Jace Peterson was criminally underrated at a 40 FV.
It’s insane that this is true “Their greatest value is as trade chips to try to bring a sustained winner to the fans of Miami, something no ownership group has tried there since the franchise began 25 years ago.”
and yet they have won two World Series in that time :/
Key word is sustained. Miami has gone all in a couple of times and it has paid off. This has been followed by a fire sale because they could not maintain the payroll of the teams that have won. Both of their WS wins they got in as the wild card. In order to have sustained success they should have gotten to the playoffs at at least a 40% rate, if not higher for around a decade. I personally believe 40% is way to low to say it was a sustained success.
In 25 seasons, the Marlins have never won the NL East.
In 25 seasons, the Marlins have won 90 games twice (92 in 1997, 91 in 2003)
In 25 seasons, the Marlins are 6-0 in postseason series.
Something, something, baseball is stupid.
The Marlins have been doing the full tear down and try to build with prospects from trades over and over basically for their entire existence. A lot of other teams have “rebuilt” as well, and acting like the Cubs and Astros were the only two teams to do this is the ultimate cherry pick.
The fact is, you need good players to be good. If you have zero good players, you need a ton of good players to be good. If you already have a few good players, you need fewer additional good players to be good. There is in fact an advantage in holding good, young, controlled players when you are not expecting to win. That’s not the mistake teams make when they are on the wrong side of the win curve. The mistake they make is continuing to sign contracts for guys that will end up being dead money. Any team, the Marlins included, that has a few good young players can be competitive pretty quickly if they don’t have dead money. With no dead money, all you need is a few more good players, and then you can fill in a bit with free agency once you are on the cusp. Tearing down every bit of good on a team and trying to build 35-40 extra wins is just a monumental task, and even if it “works” it takes 4 years to do it. The Marlins should try to remain decent, so if they are able to develop a few good players, then maybe they can compete. It’s amazing how quickly you can go from terrible to contending. Look at the 2017 Twins.
We can point at *any* one player and say “hanging onto this guy through 2022 won’t make them good in 2022, they need so much else.” But you say that about every one and you end up with zero good players.
They should hold and acquire future value, period. If the most future value from Yelich comes by also holding some wasted 2018 value, so be it. (But it would be fascinating if teams could rent out players, maybe.)
Yup. If someone blows you away for Yelich, you do it, but you don’t deal him for the sake of dealing him.
They are destined to trade him. He doesn’t want to really be there anyways. You get the most value out of him now, each extra year of team control you lose, the less value you receive back.
That’s simply not true, when dealing a guy who offers as much surplus value as Yelich currently does.
Quintana doesn’t pull Jimenez, and Miller doesn’t pull Torres, if traded in the offseason.
Yelich’s surplus is currently higher than anyone can afford.
Jeter is not rebuilding, not a single top 100 prospects for 3 very good players with surplus value. He is doing a controlled demolition and demolishing the building (dumping salary) If he trades Yelich and Realmuto he likely tries to unload a couple of bad contracts like Chen and Prado to get it down further
The rebuilding comes later, after about 5 straight years of 100+ losses that get him a top pick in each year.
By most accounts, the industry consensus was that Stanton’s contract is around market value especially with the opt-out limiting the upside.
…and then there’s the fact that Jorge Guzman is a Top 100 prospect, haha.
Dude just has no idea what he’s talking about.
Jeter makes a __base__ salary of $5 million per year. Then Jeter gets a Salesman’s commission based on cutting costs and raising profitability. Unloading everyone and stinking up the game for years means many many more million$ for Jeter.
Funny with all the downtime nothing has been written of this here. Everything written here about the Marlins is to justify the looting by Derek Jeter, Bruce Sherman and the other 29 MLB crime families.
It’s a Sammy Gravano skim operation.
$5M+/year return on a $25M investment is incredibly good.
You kidding? Gordon did not have surplus value–they did a great job getting anything of value out of Seattle. Stanton also was about market-level although they probably should have been able to extract a better return simply because he’s a premium player. And they did get prospects they liked for Ozuna; the failure there is that they overvalued them, not that they weren’t trying.
The only one I can fault them for was Stanton, since they so obviously wanted to slash payroll that they accepted a less-than-great deal. The Gordon trade was pretty impressive. The Ozuna trade was because they didn’t pick the right prospects.
I don’t think we should dismiss the idea that they actually want to rebuild, and that they just might not be doing a good job with it.
They were more than a little handcuffed by Stanton’s no-trade clause, though.
Ya, only being able to make deals to like four teams limited their options. Especially when most of them are attempting to get under the luxury tax.
I had no idea Terrance Gore had so few career games and PAs. That’s outrageous.
The Marlins’ return for Gordon and Ozuna were light, esp Ozuna.
The Marlins are skating on some pretty thin ice already. If Yelich and Realmuto are traded for prospects the remaining roster will make the 2013 Astros look like the 1927 Yankees. I have seen projections of 71-91, still much too high, but 48-114 would look possible even in a division with the Braves, Phillies and Mets. When was the last time a major league team actually sold less than a million tickets, and didn’t count the empty seats.
Well, the Marlins get to play against the Braves and Phillies too. That’s their saving grace, and very likely enough to get them to 60 wins if they dump Yelich, Realmuto, Castro, and Ziegler and keep Prado and Straily until the deadline when they can rebuild some value.
It’s pretty amazing how even bad teams can run into winning a bunch of games. You have to be phenomenally bad to lose more than 2/3rds of your games. That Tigers team in the early 2000s that set the modern record for losing–I think had only one player on the whole team with more than one fWAR.
I am old enough to remember the 1962 Mets (40-120) and, as recently as 2003, the Tigers had to win 5 of the last 6 to finish at 43-119.
I wonder if Craig is choosing to be the devil’s advocate this week or if he drew the short straw on this and the Hosmer piece. Alcantara and Guzman both likely end up as relief pitchers, albeit potentially elite ones, while Sierra is an empty average center fielder at best. None of the minor leaguers in the Gordon trade are expected to be anything significant. It’s definitely possible that the Marlins see something others don’t and that one or more of these guys ends up being very valuable, but the less than inspiring perception of these prospects is what’s driving the narrative that these moves are more about paying down the tremendous debt the ownership group assumed than building a better baseball team.
As a life long Astros fan I experienced the tanking first hand. The tanking and sell off of assets began 2 years before the Crane group bought the team. Drayton McLane was shedding payroll to make the team more enticing to potential buyers. Now sure the last year the tear down was probably orchestrated by Crane as the approval process took much longer than the Marlins sale. That was probably because Crane didn’t really want to go to the American League because of the fan fall out.
I don’t think the two are that similar. The biggest asset was Hunter Pence (no Stanton) and he was traded before Crane. The biggest asset still left was Carlos Lee who was traded the first year to Miami! I will say after Crane hired Luhnow they were up front that the primary goal was to rebuild a depleted farm system. I have not heard a plan out of the Marlins. The attendance did suffer but the down trend had started before Crane. I actually went to more games because of price seat availability and I love baseball. I actually think the forced move to the American League hurt more than the tanking.
On a side note I now love the move to the American League.
From September 2013…
https://deadspin.com/an-astros-game-had-just-1-000-tv-viewers-1333179616/1335653071
According to a source with access to the detailed Nielsen figures, the Astros game drew an average of 1,000 viewers locally over the three-plus hour broadcast. A Sky-Lynx WNBA game on NBA TV, which went head-to-head with the Astros game for more than two hours, was seen by an average of 1,500 viewers in the Houston market.
It’s as painful as it is empirical: More Houstonians watched a women’s basketball game between Chicago and Minnesota than watched the Houston Astros.
A minor point: Craig, last week you wrote that Altuve would have been a free agent this year if not for the extension. Now you say he was 6-1/2 years from FA when he signed the deal during 2013. Something doesn’t add up.
He said “after the contracts” in this article. By signing the contract, he won’t be a free agent until after the 2019 season. Prior to signing his contract, he would have been a free agent this offseason.
“The philosophy that led to their fire sale” is that they have the same revenue as the Rays.
Complaints about their not being able to pay the piper of Loria’s backloaded Stanton deal hold roughly as much merit as a theoretical criticism of the “philosophy” behind Tampa (who actually had a better 2017 record) not signing JD Martinez to a 3$/80m deal.
Right, the Marlins are down at the Rays/A’s level of revenue but had a projected 25-man Opening Day payroll for 2018 around $130 million before these trades (due to both backloading of contracts and arb salary increases). That payroll would have been roughly $45 to $60 million above where the Rays and A’s operate.
That spending would have brought back essentially the same 2017 team that won 77 games (77 win Pythag record, 79 wins by BaseRuns) even with career best seasons from Stanton and Ozuna. The farm system was terrible, perhaps the worst in baseball prior to these trades, so reinforcements weren’t going to be on the way to push that expectation upward.
It may be technically accurate to say that potential 2018 Marlins team would have been a “borderline playoff contender”, but it was very borderline indeed. A realistic 2018 expectation was for the Marlins to project as a double digit number of wins behind the Nationals in the NL East and several games behind both the Cardinals and Diamondbacks for the Wild Card spots. The Marlins would have been part of a crowded group of NL teams all projecting to be on the fringes of wild card contention, including the Rockies, Mets, Giants, Pirates, and perhaps the Brewers and Phillies. It wouldn’t shock me for one of those 5 to 7 teams to pass the Cardinals or Diamondbacks in 2018, but the odds are pretty slim for any one of those teams to get a Wild Card spot.
Fangraphs writers are usually pretty good about taking a realistic view of teams that are stuck at a mediocre level without the ability to use free agent spending or prospects (directly or as trade chips) to improve in the near-term but seem to have blinders when it comes to the Marlins. I can understand not liking what Loria did historically in Miami to screw up both the baseball team and the market, but that’s the past. The reality is that the current revenue situation for the Marlins will take something like 5 years (absolute best case) to 10+ years to improve meaningfully, so it’s absolutely logical to expect the Marlins to spend like the Rays or A’s until the revenue situation improves. I’d ask anyone to explain to me their proposed hypothetical path of how the Marlins – acknowledging both their low revenue and barren farm system – could have improved their post-2017 team by tinkering around the edges while retaining players such as Stanton and Ozuna. A team needs either additional payroll or top prospects to do that, and the Marlins had neither.
First even-handed treatment of the subject I’ve read yet! Regardless of how it turns out, there is a purpose and method to the tear-down.
Is there a consensus for the difference between tanking and rebuilding? I used to think rebuilding was considered responsible for small market teams, but now it seems like any time a team trades present for future value, they are derided for tanking. Is it simply a matter of degree? But with all the talk about the win curve, it would seem unwise to not commit to a complete rebuild. If people think it is unfair to the fans to completely tank, then I’d be really interested to hear arguments for a “partial” rebuild.
I don’t like the term “tanking” because I see it as loaded and negative, but I do see different situations between what I’ll call a “full rebuild” and a “partial rebuild (or reload)”.
I think the big distinction between the former and the latter is just being realistic about the path between the current situation and putting together a team that can, in some future years, project as at least a legitimate Wild Card contender, which means something like 85+ wins. Teams like the Cubs, Astros, and Phillies were stuck because their farm systems were so barren when they each threw in the towel and committed to full rebuilds.
The current Blue Jays and Pirates, by contrast, each look to have plausible paths where they could take a step back in 2018 (by trading Donaldson and Cole/McCutchen, respectively) but then return to legit playoff contenders in 2019 or 2020 on the backs of young talent, including minor league prospects currently in the system but still a little bit away from the majors.
So, if you asked me to draw the distinction between those two sets of projections, it’s really two-fold: does the minor league system project to improve the major league team meaningfully within the next 2-3 years, and does the team have the incremental payroll spending capacity to provide free agent reinforcements that push the team up to “legit playoff contender” on the win curve? The Marlins rated as “full rebuild” on both measures, because their revenue is so low (Rays-level) relative to payroll commitments prior to these trades and the farm system was perhaps the worst in the majors prior to these trades.
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