Looking back at the choices that the Miami Marlins made at C and SS

The Miami Marlins are not having a good season. Yes, that’s very surprising news at this point. I’ve seen some interesting theories on X, having to do with the team not doing enough at SS and C last off-season. This begs the question of whether or not better options were actually available. Were Tim Anderson and Christian Bethancourt really the best options?

Let’s start with SS, where Tim Anderson has been a disaster this season. It’s important to stress that we can’t use hindsight to determine if the Miami Marlins made the right call AT THE TIME. When Anderson was signed, he was a recent All-Star, who batted .318/.347/.474 from 2019 to 2022. Read that production again, to see how elite that was. He was coming off a down 2023, where he batted .245/.286/.296, but bounce backs happen all of the time.

So let’s look at who was available…it was easily one of the worst SS free agent classes in history. In fact, there’s literally no one there that was better than Anderson. Not even close. Most of them are simply backups. Now, what about the trade market? Well, who was even available? I can’t think of one All-Star SS or even just a solid one that was available by trade.

The catching market was even worse. Come on, take a look. It’s as bad as you can imagine. The only half-way decent option is poor defender Gary Sanchez. I guess you can argue that he would’ve been better than Bethancourt, but there’s a reason that he signed as a DH. Were there better options via trade? That’s entirely debateable. I like to think that there were, and wrote about some options. It’s complete speculation on my part however. We don’t actually know who was available.

It’s easy to blame Peter Bendix for a weak off-season, but when it comes to who was available for SS and C, who actually was? Tim Anderson was the best option, but just didn’t work out. Catcher is more of a debate, but we need more info.