Yankees Potential (Very Early) Trade Partner: Miami Marlins - hong nhung

How do you square a circle like the Miami Marlins?

A team that looked to be on the upswing made the playoffs last year, boasted a plethora of talented pitchers, and while the offense was never great, it could have been enough to get the club back to October. And now it’s all gone wrong. The brass made a decision not to elevate Kim Ng to the position of president of baseball operations and she departed, and the Fish are last in the NL East with a 0.4 percent chance of making the playoffs.

And over the weekend we got the first clues that new baseball ops head and former Rays GM Peter Bendix may be stripping the team down to the studs, as two-time batting champion Luis Arraez, the focal point of a previous deal under Ng with the Twins for Pablo López, was sent to the Padres for a trio of prospects. Now, it’s the Padres, so maybe AJ Preller just needed some stimulation, but for the Marlins to so quickly cut bait on the guy hitting .311, who had led off every game this season, might just indicate they’re already open for business.

I’m someone that believes teams wait too long to make deals — if you wait until deadline day, you’re just not getting that many games out of players that are often rentals. Still, May 3rd is early even by my count...but if the Marlins are open for business, maybe the Yankees should be calling to address some of the gaps on the current roster.

The trouble is, the Marlins’ roster is bad, but young. The most obvious trade candidates are always the rentals, and in this case that’s Josh Bell and Tim Anderson. I think it’s possible Bell could benefit from a move to Yankee Stadium, a park that certainly plays up left-handed power, but he doesn’t fit on the roster. Anthony Rizzo is firmly entrenched at first, and eventually DJ LeMahieu will return from injury. Even Oswaldo Cabrera has seen time at first base, Giancarlo Stanton won’t be sat down as the DH regularly, so it’s hard to see where Bell fits.

As for Anderson, the less said about his 57 wRC+ over his last 640 PA, the better.

The rest of the club is made up of guys who have too much team control to come cheap, even if there are question marks about them. Jake Burger’s a comfortably above-average hitter, who’s on the IL with an oblique strain and is still pre-arb. Bryan De La Cruz is in a similar boat, and the Yankee outfield is already pretty full — not one of the chief concerns of the team at this point.

That about rounds out the position players, leaving what’s still an intriguing group of pitchers. Edward Cabrera is 26 with a bit of a walk problem but is also striking out more than 35 percent of batters and notching a 54 percent groundball rate. He’s also not a free agent until 2029, and controllable starting pitching is the most expensive asset in baseball. Ryan Weathers isn’t as promising as Cabrera, much more of a project for Matt Blake, and that makes his cost — also a 2029 free agent — somewhat less prohibitive.

The Marlins are in the death zone; they’re a bad baseball team without much of a direction. You can be bad, about a third of the teams in baseball are bad to some degree, as long as you have a clear path you’re going down. The Marlins don’t have that, which makes it tough to talk about trades with them. Do they see these pre-arb pieces as key to the next good Marlins team? Is the Arraez deal a sign of a full teardown, or just a reaction to an overly zealous Padres offer?

We don’t know the answers to those questions, and frankly I’m not entirely sure Miami does either. I think teams like the Yankees should be more active earlier in the year, but I don’t think the right moves are to be found down in South Beach.