Trade Deadline Outlook: Miami Marlins

MLBTR has kicked off a new series for Front Office subscribers! Over the next few weeks, we’re going team-by-team and examining every club’s deadline outlook as trade season approaches. There are some teams that’ll be easy to categorize as buyers or sellers, but many still find themselves right on the bubble where their play over the next four to six weeks takes on extra importance.

There’s nuance even for teams that are clearly into buy or sell mode. Where are those organizations from a payroll perspective? Are the buyers all-in for 2025 or just opening a long-term competitive window? Are the sellers committed to a multi-year rebuild, or are they likely to focus only on moving rentals while hanging onto players who are controllable beyond this season? Might the baseball operations leader be on the hot seat, and if so, how could that impact their deadline decisions?

We’ll start the series with a focus on teams that have moved to the far ends of the standings, giving a bit more time for the fringe contenders to clarify their plans. This edition focuses on the Marlins, a franchise which has been undergoing a huge pivot, despite making the playoffs two years ago.

Record: 29-44 (0.0% playoff probability)

Sell Mode

Impending Free Agent: Cal Quantrill

The Marlins have already shipped out a lot of their veteran players in recent years and also made little effort to bolster their roster in the offseason. They signed two free agents this past winter. One of them was Eric Wagaman, who came into this year with 18 games of big league experience and who can be controlled until he reaches six years of service time.

The other was Cal Quantrill, who signed a one-year, $3.5MM deal. The Marlins will surely make him available this summer, though the value will surely be modest. He’s a back-end guy, at best, and contending clubs won’t pay a huge price for that.

A playoff-caliber starter would fetch a much larger return, but Quantrill has a 5.68 earned run average over his 14 starts this year. There’s probably a bit of bad luck in there, with his FIP at 4.43 and his SIERA at 4.49, but his strikeout rate has been subpar in every full season of his career. The Pirates got a lottery-ticket prospect for Martín Pérez last summer, and that’s probably what the Marlins will be looking at here.

Controllable Trade Candidates: Sandy Alcantara, Jesús Sánchez, Anthony Bender, Edward Cabrera, Ryan Weathers, Max Meyer, Otto López, Kyle Stowers, Janson Junk, Calvin Faucher, Derek Hill, Dane Myers, Xavier Edwards, Andrew Nardi, Jesús Tinoco, Ronny Henriquez, Nick Fortes