Miami Marlins TD aftermath: 3 biggest losers

The trade deadline came and went and the Miami Marlins are left in the proverbial dust. What happened? Did The Fish do good or bad? Well, I already covered the winners of the trade deadline. You can also see all of the major moves here. Now let’s move on to our list, which by the way is in no particular order.

The Miami Marlins may have been one of the losers of the trade deadline.

1. BOSTON RED SOX

Some teams can’t decide (at least the Miami Marlins did), if they’re buyers or sellers, even though the decision was seemingly already made for them by the standings. The Boston Red Sox are 17 games out of first place in the AL East and 2 games out of the final AL Wild Card spot. They however have the Toronto Blue Jays, Tampa Bay Rays, Cleveland Guardians, Chicago White Sox and even BALTIMORE ORIOLES all ahead of them.

The smart thing to do was to sell as the rotation is a mess with ace Chris Sale likely done for the season. With their chances of making a deep playoff run or having home field advantage in the playoffs low, selling was the only right call.

In a bizarre move, the Boston Red Sox seemed to play both sides, by trading C Christian Vázquez and RP Jake Diekman to the Houston Astros and the Chicago White Sox. They then acquired such “important” pieces as C Reese McGuire and LF Tommy Pham. McGuire is a good long-term piece, but Pham doesn’t at all solve all of their offensive issues. They need power and none of this added any.

The biggest problem was not trading free agents-to-be DH J.D. Martinez and SS Xander Bogaerts. I actually covered J.D. Martinez as a target for the Miami Marlins, now in the off-season of course. Boston has been trying to move on from Martinez for the last two years, this was their chance. They could’ve gotten something for him…and now they’ll probably get nothing. I don’t see them handing a qualifying offer to a 35 year old DH.

Xander Bogaerts is even worse, Boston management talked for a while about their desire to improve team defense. It has been already established that they don’t want him as their SS. They don’t want to pay him what he wants, to the point where he feels insulted and signed Trevor Story to effectively replace him at SS. So why is Bogaerts still on the team? He’ll opt-out after the season and a QO draft pick is the best that they will get for him now. The stupidity here is astounding.

Unfortunately it indeed is. Why is Avisaíl García still a Miami Marlins player? There were options for bad contract swaps and Kim Ng didn’t take any of them. It’s possible that it was too hard to do of course, but they still could’ve tried and with no rumors to the contrary, I assume that Ng is still refusing to admit that this was a bad investment.

What happened to trading Pablo López? There were rumors that the Miami Marlins were shopping him we’re going around prior to the trade deadline. Reportedly we wanted a lot for him and that’s why no deal was agreed upon. Making it worse, reports were claiming that we didn’t even approach him about an extension first. What’s going on here?!

The Miami Marlins needed to approach Pablo López with an extension, and only if he didn’t accept a reasonable offer, trade him for hitting. This was the time to make a decision on him one way or the other, and it wasn’t complicated. Offer him a reasonable extension and either he accepts it, or he does not and we trade him. His highest trade value is now anyway and the closer he is to free agency, the less likely us he to agree to an extension.

The Miami Marlins did do one good trade, acquiring hitting prospect Jordan Groshans for relief pitchers Anthony Bass and Zach Pop. This was a good deal, but it was just one move. We needed to do a lot more. How about a managerial change?

The Miami Marlins had a mostly quiet trade deadline. No bad contracts were shed and not enough hitting was acquired. This wasn’t the trade deadline that the Miami Marlins and the fans deserved.