Miami Marlins Trade For Dan Straily: Three Key Questions

Do You Trust The Front Office? 

This is the tricky part. Sometimes they trade Nathan Eovaldi for David Phelps and Martin Prado. Sometimes, not so much. You need only look as far as the team at the other side of the table to have some real concerns with this swap. The current ace of the Reds rotation is Anthony Desclafani after all, while Mat Latos still finds himself looking for work as a free agent.

The recent history isn’t great, with most of the moves made to add on to this corp just not working out. The flip side is that they put together this corp, with names like Marcell Ozuna, J.T. Realmuto, and Christian Yelich all unearthed by the Marlins organization. So they’ve had their successes as well.

Which is this then? Depends how much you value prospects, and more to the point, our current prospects. Yes, the Marlins traded three Top 10 prospects. But our farm system is currently regarded as nothing less than terrible. Did we lose that much, really? The farm will never be rebuilt if we keep dealing pieces away, but that doesn’t mean you lock yourself in to keeping pieces you don’t value just because they’re pieces.

And that brings us back to the fact the Marlins front office has now traded Luis Castillo twice. Popular opinion amongst many evaluators that know far more than I do see this as a mistake, to the extent that the only reason Michael Hill must have had for pulling the trigger on this was worrying fans couldn’t handle a world where two guys named Luis Castillo wore a Marlins uniform.

Putting that reason aside though, after the big Colin Rea redo last summer, they had five months to rethink things, and still traded him. Even after the team lost their young, controllable, face of the franchise starting pitcher under unspeakably tragic circumstances.  Surely the club’s evaluators would know more than anyone else, right? About Castillo, about Brice, about a random outfielder that’s just a little blocked at the moment?

It’s possible anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I wish they hadn’t made the deal either. But just the devil’s advocate argument on the table.