2024 Team Previews: Miami Marlins
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
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Marlins Intro
When I think about the Marlins, the first thing that comes to mind is this thing:
And that’s too bad because the second thing I think of is Juan Pierre’s batting stance in MVP 2005. Greatest video ever created.
I don’t have much to say about the Marlins though. They’re a pretty forgettable franchise besides those two random World Series titles in 1997 and 2003. They’ve made the playoffs four times in their 21 years and have a 50% World Series win rate. That dropped 16 points after being quickly ousted from the 2023 playoffs after they sneaked in with 84 wins.
It’s not a horrible roster by any means, but the offense is still suspect and the pitching staff is hurt a bunch by the Sandy Alcantara injury. They’ll come in to 2024 with some exciting arms, but pretty much nothing in terms of proven, reliable arms.
It would seem that the Marlins are set up for a losing record in 2024. They’ve been quiet this off-season, and that makes sense. The loss of Sandy is crippling, so it makes some sense to save the resources for 2025 when he’s back and maybe when they’re really ready to unleash Eury Perez. That could be a sick 1-2 punch starting next year, and there are plenty of young guys with upside on the roster. So let’s get into it.
Hitters
Jazz Chisholm
Age: 26
Pos: OF
Another year of Jazz missing time to injury, and the numbers he posted while on the field weren’t exactly ground breaking.
399 PA, .253/.314/.460, 29.8% K%, 7.8% BB%, 19 HR, 20.8 PA/HR, 24 SB
He was healthy enough for just 240 PA in 2022, so the list of injuries is really building for him. By my count it’s five trips to the IL in three years, and then two other times he had a cough.
So he would seem to be prone to the cough, so drop him down the ranks in your leagues where you get negative points for spreading germs.
Now we’ll stop talking about injuries, because trying to predict injuries is stupid, especially with hitters.
The K% is high and the BB% is middling, so that brings the slash line down substantially. But when he’s putting the bat on the ball, he’s an exciting player to say the least.
For his Major League career now he has a .769 OPS with a 21.9 PA/HR and a high 30% stolen base attempt rate. He hits homers and steals bags, and that’s what we want from our fantasy draft picks.
He is not without issues, of course, so let’s go over those.
The contact rate was bad in 2023, and it was bad in 2022. That makes us expect a higher strikeout rate for him. The high GB% was a new thing for him in 2023, as he went from 39% to 50%.
The bottom line is that there’s 30-30 upside with Chisholm, and in fact with a full season’s worth of PAs, we actually project him to do just that. Huge upside, but fair questions about the health. All things considered, I’m in on Chisholm - as I’ve said over and over again here, I want as many 20-20 guys as possible, and I tend to downgrade the “injury-prone” guys a lot less than the field.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Luis Robert
JA Projection: 566 PA, 78 R, 26 HR, 84 RBI, 27 SB, .240/.301/.452, .753 OPS
Luis Arraez
Age: 26
Pos: 2B
We have to dust off the player rater for this one. Arraez is a bit of a roto fantasy baseball enigma. He was one of the most talked about hitters in baseball last year as he was hitting near .400 for the season’s first few months.
Here are his season total batting averages at the end of each month:
April: .438
May: .381
June: .390
July: .381
Aug: .349
Oct: .354
Arraez hit just .236 in August despite keeping the K% at 7%, it was a really strange month for him, and in that month he hit two homers and stole one base - he was a disaster for all of the fantasy teams that started him through that (which was probably done in every single league since he was hitting freaking .381 coming into that month).
At the end of the season, we had this:
617 PA, 71 R, 10 HR, 69 RBI, .354/.393/.469, 3 SB
It’s a fantastic batting average, but very few counting stats came out of that.
If we look at the player rater, Arraez was just #120 on the list, behind names like Daulton Varsho and Mauricio Dubon. That’s right, Varsho hit .222 and out-did Arraez who hit .354. That’s what 20 homers and 16 steals will do for you.
The lesson here is that if you aren’t hitting homers or stealing bases, there’s almost nothing you can do to make yourself a valuable 5x5 roto fantasy baseball asset.
Things are a bit different in points leagues where you’re accruing points for all of those singles, but Arraez is simply over-valued in the fantasy game.
He goes around pick #150 in drafts this year, and as we just said - he’s hardly a top 120 HITTER, so you throw the pitchers in there too and you’re well above pick 200. The price is wrong on Arraez, so I can’t see myself pulling the trigger on him unless I start my team with a bunch of HR+SB guys that have horrible batting averages. That could work, I suppose.
The average projection between the three models (ATC, Steamer, and my own) gives him a $6.65 roto value, similar to Brandon Lowe and Tommy Edman.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Jonathan India
JA Projection: 630 PA, 85 R, 12 HR, 60 RBI, 4 SB, .304/.358/.435, .793 OPS
Jake Burger
Age: 27
Pos: 3B
Burger was freed in 2023, getting traded to Miami and finally getting steady playing time. That turned into what we expected (a ton of homers) and a little bit more even!
536 PA, 71 R, 34 HR, 80 RBI, .250/.310/.520, .830 OPS, 27% K%, 6% BB%
The 30-homer season should not have surprised anybody, this guy is one of the best raw-power hitters in professional baseball. His 90th percent EV in 2023 was 110.3, making him just one of six hitters to go over 110 in that mark. He hit a ball as hard as 118.2 miles per hour, making him one of just six hitters to exceed 118.
Since 2022, Burger has a 16% Brl% and an elite 17 PA/HR (42 homers in 718 PA). He will probably hit 30 homers again in 2024, which makes him someone to draft in all leagues.
The downside is that he doesn’t steal bases (just one in the last two seasons), and the batting average is questionable.
The K% was 27%, which isn’t good - but it’s really not all that bad when you consider the amount of raw power he has - he really makes it count when he does make contact.
The team splits are pretty weird here:
CWS: .214/.279/.527, 31.6% K%, 6.8% BB%
MIA: .304/.357/.510, 20.7% K%, 4.7% BB%
Some more splits to see if there’s anything here other than randomness:
CWS: 54% Swing%, 65% Contact%
MIA: 54% Swing%, 68% Contact%
So the approach doesn’t seem to have changed, but the contact rate did get a little bit better. It’s possible he slowed his swing down slightly to make a more contact (his barrel rate did go from 19.6% in Chicago to 13.2% in Miami), but the results were clearly much better with Miami - so it’s a good sign if nothing else heading into 2024.
I don’t think there’s a ton of ceiling here given the zero steals and the fact that a really good batting average is out of reach. But that said, a 35-homer, 100 RBI, .265 batting average season is in the range of outcomes, which makes him a good power bat to grab if you have a bunch of steals early on.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Elly De La Cruz, Ha-Seong Kim
JA Projection: 588 PA, 78 R, 28 HR, 91 RBI, 2 SB, .260/.321/.496, .817 OPS
Josh Bell
Age: 31
Pos: 1B
He was another player on the move last trade deadline, starting the year with Cleveland and ending up in Miami. The end of the season line for the big man:
611 PA, 52 R, 22 HR, 74 RBI, .249/.327/.422, .749 OPS, 0 SB
The last three seasons for Bell have seen him hit just .259/.346/.439 with a .784 OPS, 66 homers (27.4 PA/HR) and not a single steal.
Now he’s 31 and not projecting to help a fantasy team very much, but he’s not a bad hitter by any means.
He just seems to be a guy that you don’t really know why you’re drafting him. He hits some homers and can drive in some runs if he’s in the middle of the decent Marlins’ lineup, but you have no hope of getting steals or a high batting average from him, and a 35+ homer season would seem to be a true outlier outcome.
I will rank and draft plenty of players worse than him, so we have to get him in the mix. The average projection gives him a $4.60 value, similar to guys like Nathaniel Lowe and Alec Bohm, but I don’t have those guys ranked yet so I can’t call them comps!
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Anthony Rizzo, Brandon Drury
JA Projection: 606 PA, 77 R, 21 HR, 74 RBI, 0 SB, .257/.342/.434, .776 OPS
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