Wins mounting for Miami Marlins, but so are the injuries

The Miami Marlins just had their best week since April, and did it despite mounting injuries for a depleted roster. That’s a new trick for them.

It was quite a week for the Miami Marlins … and that’s without even getting into the wins and losses.

Last Tuesday, in one of the most bizarre moments I can ever recall happening in professional sports, the Marlins held a team meeting, only to have manager Don Mattingly come out afterwards and say that he expected his team to play “flat” and suggested that the meeting might not have worked. Oh, and the topic of the meeting very well might have involved veterans expressing discontent with budding young superstar Jazz Chisholm Jr. As if that wasn’t disruptive enough, two more Miami Marlins position regulars were knocked out of the lineup this week, and pitcher Pablo López took a sharp liner off his right forearm that knocked him out of his start early. All told, this is a roster with injury concerns for three Opening Day starters, their best utility player, and is down two-fifths of their starting rotation, with being three-fifths down still looming as a real possibility.

This is the part where I should probably mention that the Miami Marlins just went 5-1 last week.

Arguably, it was the team’s best week of the season, and there is zero debate that it was nothing short of season saving. The offense? Dominant. The starting pitching? Excellent. The bullpen? Hey, they might have even found an answer to those ninth-inning woes. Coming into Monday night, the team sits just 5.5 games back of an NL Wild Card slot.

The winning has been the big story, at least since last Tuesday’s 12-2 pummeling of the Washington Nationals went final. But it is the fact that they did that winning short-handed, and are much worse off entering this week than they were entering this past one, that warrants the most attention from Miami Marlins fans.

On the positive side, this kind of newfound resilience in the face of adversity is something we haven’t seen from Miami since 2020. That season, they made a surprise playoff run despite suffering one of the league’s more massive COVID-19 outbreaks. In 2021, unfortunately, they buckled repeatedly when stars like Chisholm, Starling Marte, and others found themselves on the shelf. Improving organizational depth was a point of emphasis entering 2022, and the organization seems to have done just that.

On the other hand, that depth is being sorely tested right now, and it’s been fair to question all year whether enough was done to make this roster remotely playoff caliber. That includes improving that depth. Miami now faces seven road games against two very hot division rivals, and needs to win at least three of them to keep their season alive. Probably four. If the team doesn’t get some needed reinforcements this week, those three victories could be a tall order.

The Miami Marlins have played great over the past week, but there is still a ton to be concerned about. Miami is going to need that newfound 2022 resilience more than ever.