The More The Marlins Change, The More They Stay The Same

Miami Marlins manager Mike Redmond might be out of a job by the end of the week. This is partly his fault, and mostly everyone else's.

The rumors oozed into the local papers Monday, when the Marlins were mired in a 3-10 sinkhole that had already claimed ace-by-default Henderson Alvarez for an undetermined amount of time. Things are far from ideal in Jeffrey Loria's pastel wonderland, in other words, but that picture is only as bleak as the vantage point. This is an objectively slow but not altogether damning start for a talent-rich but flawed young roster that, for the better part of a year, has played without its devastating staff ace. It is catastrophic for a team with designs on the World Series, something a segment of the media had talked itself into. But it's only a fireable offense if the Marlins front office believed as much, too.

This was hilariously misguided, if not altogether dumb. Yes, the Marlins really might have the best outfield in the majors, with burgeoning on-base savant Christian Yelich and thumping Marcell Ozuna joining forces with Giancarlo Stanton's Star Destroyer bat in an all 25-and-under trio. They also opened the season with an all-glove, no-bat shortstop who somehow happens to flunk most every defensive metric (Adeiny Hechevarria); a veteran catcher on an ascending contract who already lost his gig to a Triple-A call-up (Jarrod Saltalamacchia); and an everyday first baseman who hasn't hit lefties since Obama's first term in office (Mike Morse). Dreaming on the rotation wasn't any smarter, not when there were ample warning signs about Mat Latos—albeit none that directly pointed to his Hindenburg 2.0 status after three starts—or expected regression from Alvarez. Jose Fernandez is legitimately great enough to be some kind of panacea all by his lonesome, but he won't pitch until the height of summer at the earliest, and it takes a special brand of willful ignorance to presume he'd be ready to pitch without limitations in a pennant race.

For media people proclaiming the Marlins a contender, this was a case of speculative upside, and far less of a coronation than a parlay with a high payout. This is all guesswork, anyway, so why not guess bravely?

The Marlins do not have this excuse themselves. If Miami's higher-ups really did yield to this delusion, it would be another landmark moment in Jeffrey Loria's long-running tour of egregiousness. That the team was talking about firing a manager after 13 games suggests that Loria took a dangerously long position on his team's hype.

Of course, this could also just be dickish loose talk from someone with more power than he knows what to do with. This is the Loria touch—it's hard to tell where his jerkish instincts end and actual strategy begins. There's not enough bandwidth on this website to delve into every insidious detail of his perverse macro-level un-accomplishments, which include driving a stake through the heart of one of the sport's most charming markets and actively antagonizing the city of Miami's baseball populace. Loria is also the rare owner who is just as insufferable in day-to-day life as he is in the abstract, belly-flopping like a buffoon into the waters of clubhouse minutiae and mindlessly snapping apart the team's roster every few years the way a toddler tears down a half-built Lego set. The only reason anyone has come up with for Loria's impatience with Redmond is that the owner has a "strong preference for fiery managers," which in and of itself amounts to selling off a car because the engine doesn't rev loud enough for his liking.

None of this should be construed as an implicit defense of Redmond. There are only two seasons of real data to judge him on, and even those only explain so much after Loria shipped $146.5 million in payroll to the Blue Jays after the 2013 campaign, the team's first in the Marlins' new, taxpayer-funded stadium. Redmond is still growing, in other words, which is exactly what Miami's young roster is doing alongside him. Sustained progress ought to be the only expectation for a team purportedly committing itself to developing homegrown talent, especially one whose entire existence was heretofore defined by an endless yo-yoing between disassembly and reassembly. This was the supposed impetus for Stanton's gargantuan $325 extension in the offseason—Loria was paying a star, but also signaling that continuity and permanence are possible for the franchise that sterilized two different World Series teams before the banners could even be printed.

Jettisoning Redmond won't sabotage that initiative, or maybe not even jeopardize it; managers only do so much, really. What it would do, though, is signal yet again that this is still Jeffrey Loria's team, and that he will mess with it as he wishes. Firing Mike Redmond would be both a flagrant, unnecessary reminder that it's rarely better when things change for their own sake, and that change-for-change's sake is still the only kind Jeffrey Loria understands.