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It is a stunning turn for a Marlins team that exceeded expectations a year ago and earned a National League wild-card spot with 84 wins.
There are a lot of factors at play here for why they have regressed so badly.
The first one, and perhaps the easiest to justify, is that their starting rotation has been decimated by injuries with Sandy Alcantara, Edward Cabrera, Eury Perez and Braxton Garrett all being sidelined. Alcantara and Perez had to undergo Tommy John surgery, while Cabrera and Garrett were injured during spring training.
There is not a team in baseball that is going to find much success when four of its five starting pitchers are injured.
The Marlins have already allowed 62 runs in nine games, including seven games where they have allowed at least six runs.
But it is not just the pitching that has hurt them.
The lineup has been equally bad with a .589 OPS with almost no contributions from their top players including Josh Bell, Luis Arraez and Jazz Chisholm Jr.
As promising as the Marlins’ 2023 season was, there should have been some concerns coming into this season even before you get into the injuries to the pitching staff. The biggest concern was their shockingly good winning percentage in one-run games (33-14) a year ago. If you want to be positive, you can say they were a tough, gritty team that found ways to grind out wins and played well in the clutch. That may have been true to a certain extent. The more realistic outlook on that, however, is that they probably had a little bit of luck on their side and it is really difficult to win that many close games on a year-to-year basis.
Only one of the Marlins’ first nine losses this season has been by one run, but they have dropped two extra-inning and two two-run games. Nothing is going their way.
If they lose on Sunday they will be the first 0-10 since the 2002 season when the Detroit Tigers did it.
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