Miami Marlins still need one more piece this offseason

The Miami Marlins finally made their big splash addition, but they’re still one piece away from a successful offseason.

If Miami Marlins fans are being honest with themselves, this offseason has already been far more active than they had any right to hope for at last season’s end.

However, that doesn’t mean there still isn’t work to be done.

They are still one move away, at least one, from really putting a bow on this thing and offering fans a team they can feel confident in heading into the 2023 MLB season. One more signing, and a dark horse run at Wild Card contention feels much less like something that happens when you set MLB The Show 23 to rookie mode, and much more like one of those weird storylines that happens every other year in real life baseball.

Exactly what is that one piece the Miami Marlins need? Barring some last-second trade for a star outfielder, that one piece is unquestionably a high-leverage reliever.

That remains true even after the somewhat surprising acquisition earlier this week of 2021 All-Star closer Matt Barnes from the Boston Red Sox. Barnes was a revelation for most of that season, and looked unstoppable for the final two months of 2022, when he was able to rattle off six saves and a 1.59 ERA. The problem is the rest of 2022 and end of 2021, where he was abjectly horrible. Much of that could be explained away by injuries, and it is that bounce back that the Marlins are obviously counting on. Still, that bounce back is a long shot. It also doesn’t add more talent, just replaces one talented enough arm (Richard Bleier) with another talented enough arm with a higher ceiling in Barnes.

That still leaves the Marlins in the position of having to navigate the NL East, a division that according to The Athletic contains three of the top five teams in MLB, with a bullpen that projects to feature multiple players who haven’t proven they belong on an MLB roster. It’s a rather inexplicable position for a team that relies so heavily on its pitching to be taking. For six to seven innings, there might not be five teams that can match them. Yet for the last two innings of the game, there might be five teams with bigger question marks. Even the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates have David Bednar.

One more signing changes that though. There still should be some wiggle room in their payroll. The aforementioned Barnes trade is basically a financial push with all the money the Red Sox are kicking in.

So come on, Miami. Go after Alex Reyes. Bring aboard Andrew Chafin. Roll the dice on Corey Knebel. Any one of those moves puts the Marlins in the position to be dramatically stronger in the back end of the bullpen, and able to feel much more confident that the efforts of their elite starting rotation won’t be wasted nearly as much as in 2022.

Until they add that final piece though? It’s just another year of the Miami Marlins approach to closer bringing to mind the old joke about the definition of insanity:

Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Time to mix it up, Miami.