Miami Marlins Jazz Chisholm Was Never Hanley Ramirez, But Can He Be Devon White?

It would appear that the Jazz Chisholm Jr. experience has come to an end for the Miami Marlins.

Still, what a fascinating legacy he's leaving in his wake as he swims off to greener contending pastures after Saturday's trade with the Yankees. His career has truly been a bag as mixed as the metaphors uncorked in that last sentence. A fact that will be no less true whether he becomes the finishing piece to a championship in 2024, finally breaks through and becomes the kind of star on the field that he carried himself as off of it, or just continues to remain one of baseball's biggest enigmas.

Okay, fine, he carries himself as a major star on the field too. There's a reason a not insignificant proportion of his MLB peers view him as overrated. Chisholm is a good player, very good even. But the status he held as the best player on his team this season? Way more an indictment of the Miami Marlins roster than an accurate reflection of his current talent, and a title he only held if you disqualified injured pitchers Sandy Alcantara and Eury Perez.

In short, he was never the Miami Marlins next Hanley Ramirez.

Now, that might seem like a dated example. Certainly, he never produced a season for Miami that equalled the best Marlins work of Marcell Ozuna, J.T. Realmuto, Giancarlo Stanton, or Christian Yelich either. Yet of those players, only Stanton was ever really expected to be that "best player on the roster" type talent. And for all his power, that was really it for Stanton- he was never a threat to impact the game in as many ways as Ramirez did and Chisholm was supposed to.

Yet for much of his Marlins tenure, Jazz was popularly viewed by many a Marlins fan as the equal and heir to all those stars, and much closer to the Ramirez tier than the Ozuna one. As a piece you build an entire team around, and not just as a valuable but ultimately replaceable part of a greater whole. As a nearly untouchable player, a "prince" worth a king's ransom of prospects if he was ever to be moved. As one of the great players in baseball- period.

But he never actually played that way with the Marlins, at least not consistently. It was always more potential than promise. He was electric, exciting to watch...because of what he could do. Could. For what he did day in and day out though? Not so much. Definitely not as much as Miami's other All-Star hitters provided. Not even close to what Ramirez did. Yet he's going to be remembered as one of Miami's biggest stars. This will go down as yet another example of the Marlins moving on from one of their stars.

Yet at the end of the day, I'm just not sure this deserves to rank as high on the sin list as I suspect it's going to for the majority of Marlins fans. Because while he was great, and this does stink, he wasn't a true superstar. He wasn't Hanley 2.0.

He could be Devon White though.

Alright, the analogy isn't perfect. White was a Gold Glove caliber defender, and as a veteran free agent, was not home grown by any means when he started suiting up for the Marlins. Still, he was a key piece of two rosters built to contend. He even helped Miami win it all in 1997 before packed off to Arizona- the Marlins secret favorite trading partner.

A key piece, but not indispensable either. Not the face of the franchise. White was asked to help get the Marlins over the hump, to be a big part of a greater whole...yet was arguably never even considered to be one of the five best players on his team.

Jazz, on the other hand, was essentially asked to be the guy from the moment Starling Marte was traded, if not from the start of 2021 season. He never really delivered on that, outside of the first two months of the 2022 campaign before he went down with an injury. As for the two times he was part of a playoff roster with the Marlins? Just like with White, it would be very hard to argue he was amongst the five players most responsible for getting Miami to the postseason. Granted, any hope of postseason success in 2023 did rest on Jazz finding a way to elevate his game in a way that was never true for White...but I think that serves to only further illustrate the point that the White role might be a much better fit for Jazz than the Hanley mantle that he carried from the moment he became a Marlin.

Obviously, Jazz Chisholm Jr. is still plenty young, and still has plenty of promise. There's also the not inconsequential matter of the short porch in Yankee stadium he'll now get to aim for during home games. This time next season, he could look like a perennial All-Star and every bit the star that he wants to become. If that breakthrough comes though, I think a big role could be a lessening of the pressure. He doesn't need to be the guy for the Yankees, just one of the guys. It's not as if he's going to walk into the Yankees clubhouse acting as if he's superior to Aaron Judge or Juan Soto.

All that remains to be seen for Marlins fans is whether or not whatever prospects come back can be as successful as Jazz was during his time here. And who knows? Maybe one of those players makes a greater run at that Hanley tier than Jazz ever did.