Miami Marlins need to do better for their minor leaguers

According to the latest Advocates For Minor Leaguers report card, it would appear the Miami Marlins have some work to do. It’s a bad look.

Baseball fans are long used to hearing about the low spending ways of the Miami Marlins.

However, what might come as news is the fact that said low spending apparently extends to their minor league system as well. According to the latest report card by Advocates For Minor Leaguers, an organization founded in 2020 committed to improving conditions for minor league baseball players, the Miami Marlins are one of two teams in MLB (so far) to have not offered either extended spring training pay or to give all players their own bedroom. The Los Angeles Angels are the other.

It’s a bad look for any MLB team. To be clear, all 30 MLB teams should be scoring perfect grades on these report cards and paying their minor leaguers a true living wage. It’s reprehensible that they don’t. However, for a historically low payroll team like the Miami Marlins? It looks even worse, and there’s even less of an excuse.

Being a Miami Marlins fan brings with it the burden of accepting certain realities about payroll and frequent roster turnover. Miami will never be a top 10 spender, and the odds of a star player ever spending their entire career in a Marlins uniform are extremely remote. Unless a change in ownership or a major change in organizational philosophy happens, winning in South Florida will always depend on a mix of maximizing young talent and luck.

On the plus side, you get to not be a Mets fan.

Kidding aside though, the MLB penury is expected, if not quite accepted. But if so much of Miami’s success depends on maximizing what they get out of their young talent, why isn’t their young talent treated the best? Why wouldn’t the organization want their minor leaguers to be the best fed, best conditioned, best treated, most mentally and physically fit minor leaguers in baseball? It’s baffling, and seems like a wasted opportunity to gain a significant competitive advantage over the rest of the league. And it’s a competitive advantage that would likely cost them less annually than one year of say, an Avisail Garcia‘s salary to make a reality.

Some reports this offseason suggested the Miami Marlins wanted to take the Tampa Bay Rays path to team building. Well, the Rays received passing grades in both categories on their progress report. Seems like proof of concept to me.

Now, as noted above, it wasn’t just the Marlins that came up short. The Angels did as well. But from a strictly competitive standpoint, at least the Angels pay for Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout to anchor their lineup. The Marlins can’t point to such distractions. To be fair, this report card does only focus on two categories: extended spring training pay and players having their own bedroom. Maybe the Marlins are great at other things that effect minor league conditions.

Coming up short in two categories that important though? It’s just a bad look for an organization that has been working so hard to change their image. The Miami Marlins need to do better.