Which of these winning Fish will become another April Fool for Miami Marlins?

Multiple baseball games have been played, and the Miami Marlins have a winning record.

Stop the presses, right? Obviously, there are no shortage of stories to kick off the MLB season. Torpedo bats. Fun MLB TV glitches. Did I mention topedo bats? And naturally, a ton of hot and cold starts for fans to overreact to.

The cardiac inducing, miracle Marlins have been just as fun as any change in the hitting hardware though. Being just the fifth team in MLB history to win their first three games all in walk-off fashion is nothing to sneeze at, and just a welcome change of pace from what might have been the most depressing start to a Marlins season in franchise history just a year ago. As the great Marlins sage Craig Mish was quick to note on Twitter, the 2025 Marlins are 3-1 to start the year. The 2024 model needed to lose fourteen games to hit that three win mark.

Back to those hot starts though, there have obviously been some strong performances driving these Marlins to victory. Well those, and a generous amount of Pirates help from the defensively inept Oneil Cruz and perfectly cooked closer David Bednar. Hopefully, the efforts on the Marlins side of the ledger portend good things to come, and full season performances that will lead to the front office ending the season with a few more answers on who this still rebuilding club should be building around.

Then again, Marlins fans have been fooled before by strong early performances. Which begs the question, will any of this group join the ranks of famous Marlins April Fools?

I mean, who could forget Emilio Bonifacio, a player who started with such a bang that he came to literally define flash in the pan success for a generation of fantasy baseball players? Matthew Berry and Nate Ravitz introduced the phrase "Bonafide or Bonifacio" to the world off of his torrid 4-5, 1 HR, 2 RBI, 3 SB Opening Day performance, and the 16 hits he had through the first week of that season.

Needless to say, he cooled down rather quickly, even if he remains a Marlins fan favorite and still actually active professional baseball player.

The same esteem cannot be said to exist for another Marlins April Fool, one who spent the entire month looking like a difference maker: Hee-Seop Choi. Brought aboard in 2004 as the direct replacement of Gold Glove slugger Derrek Lee, Choi spent the first month of the season absolutely mashing. By the end of April he had hit a staggering 9 HRs, to go along with a .295/.419/.738 slash line.

Sadly, the cliff's edge came very quickly. Choi only hit 6 HRs over the next three months, and the Marlins pounced on an opportunity to package him off to the Dodgers as part of the Paul Lo Duca deal.

There have been other instances too. The 19 games where Alejandro De Aza hit over .300 while looking like the Marlins CF of the future in 2007 comes to mind. Jeremy Hermida had a white hot start a year later before pumpkining again. The list goes on.

So who are the best candidates so far from this year's team for Miami Marlins April Fool status?

Otto Lopez and Dane Meyers make for obvious names as they both sport .400 averages through the season's first five games. Lopez even has 2 HRs. Smart money would say Lopez continuing his NL MVP candidate pace is unlikely, but could he stick as a big league regular? That seems at least as likely as his turning back into waiver wire fodder, if not more so at this point. As for Meyers, it all comes down to injury luck, and his finally getting a large enough sample size to reach a real conclusion. Yet Luis Arraez 2.0 he is not.

On the other hand, the continuation of bad play could also qualify here. As the kids today might say of the performance to date of Jonah Bride and Xavier Edwards, it's not what you want. Both are well below Mendoza, with Bride boasting an anemic .111/.273/.111 line. Certainly, it's way too early to reach any conclusions on April 1st. But if what follows is either a month long continuation of this fall back to earth, or just a month long slump before they revert back to the caliber of performance that made them 2024 bright spots?

In that event, they could easily find themselves one day being mentioned in the same breath as Bonifacio and Choi.

All of this is just to say, take a breath as these next few weeks play out. In a 162-game season, the stats can turn on their head very quickly this early into it. Some of these stars could just be stars in the making. Household names in Miami for years to come.

Others though? The could be gone by summer, if not May. Only time will tell if any of these early Marlins standouts will end up being the next Marlins April Fool.