Miami Marlins keep alive hope for quick turnaround with deadline deals

It was a trade deadline to remember for the Miami Marlins.

There's no disputing that fact. Over the last five days, Miami traded away nine players from their MLB roster, acquiring fifteen players in return. Oh, and $2.25 million dollars. Can't forget that. It's a transformative haul, dragging the Marlins farm system rankings from the dregs of the league back to respectability.

Of course, as ever with baseball, there are two schools of thought on this. Especially for a franchise with the Miami Marlins' penchant for...let's call it roster reshuffling.

On the one hand, the franchise desperately needed this. Just two weeks ago, Marlins fans would have been hard pressed to name a minor league hitter in the organization they were excited about seeing make it to the majors. Between these deadline deals and the recent draft, there's suddenly four or five faces fans will be racing to minor league bllparks and spring training games to get a look at.

On the other, Marlins fans have been here before. Plenty are viewing this as just the latest in a long, sad history of injuries heaped upon a fanbase that would have a solid claim at being the most woeful in all of professional sports if it weren't for the pesky matter of those two world championships. Well that, and the fact that they don't have to spend their winters in Cleveland or Pittsburgh. And that's just the fans that are left- more than jumped ship years ago.

Still, nine players moved. Fifteen coming back. Love it or hate it, the scale of what just happened is immense. The Marlins have never done this, at least not at a trade deadline. Not midseason. Not mid warmup, as essentially happened with the last flurry of deals.

Yet the most exciting part of what just happened isn't the volume. It's how close so many of these recently added pieces should be to contributing to the MLB roster.

The Luis Arraez trade? The MLB Draft? The pieces added there are closer to Complex League Marlins territory than being ready for the Miami Marlins themselves. Consequently, the belief was that all the acquisitions made this deadline would be made with a similar focus on the distant future. Not the near term.

Instead, the layering of talent referenced by Peter Bendix since joining the Marlins...actually did seem to happen.

Which means that the chance for on the field improvement in 2025 still exists. More realistically, 2026 should probably be viewed as the first season to actually be optimistic about, but that's a lot better than the 2028 timeline that was looking likely prior to this deadline. At the end of the day, as long as Miami is positioned to run out a starting rotation featuring Sandy Alcantara, Eury Perez, and another above average starter, dismissing their chances entirely seems foolish- provided there are players on the roster capable of delivering some above average offense.

Suddenly, it would be a surprise if that wasn't true of the 2025 Miami Marlins.

No matter how you feel about ownership deciding another rebuild was necessary, keeping that kind of hope alive heading into next year is a win for the franchise.