Win the Trade Deadline
The most accessible milestone for the Miami Marlins to check off in 2018 might also prove the most difficult. It’s undoubtedly the most difficult to pinpoint exactly what achieving it would look like.
The organization needs to own their upcoming Trade Deadline.
Of course, that criteria covers a lot of ground. Winning the deadline could mean wheeling and dealing like mad. It could mean standing pat. Hopefully, it’ll say something in between. It’s entirely dependent on how players develop to that point, and how the team is doing in the standings.
What cannot happen is to have another July come and go where every baseball expert observes the Marlins made a poor trade — that they could have gotten better prospects, if only they were willing to eat some of the cost. That what just happened was business as usual, about anything other than building a winner.
The Miami Marlins are more than welcome to trade J.T. Realmuto this summer. They just need to do so as part of a trade that is viewed as the outright robbery of a desperate contender’s farm system. Alternatively, they can stand pat, for better or worse letting this group play things out. Maybe not rushing any prospects to save money is what a win looks like.
Or they somehow find takers for that massive Wei-Yin Chen contract. Lots of ways to pull this off — just so long as fans enter August believing the best interests of the team were served, and not only the bank accounts of the Marlins new owners.