PHOENIX — The biggest loss of October came not in a playoff game but when the Marlins inexplicably forced out GM Kim Ng after she guided the franchise to its first full-season postseason in two decades.
The unforced error not only cost them their well-liked leader, but goodwill and trust throughout the organization. Word is all of Manager of the Year candidate Skip Schumaker, the coaching staff and players are upset by the nonsensical decision.
Everyone assumed Ng would be back with an extension after a year where she made the correct call to tab Schumaker (overruling a 5-2 vote among decisionmakers to hire Matt Quatraro), acquired batting champion Luis Arraez, posted the fourth-best record in Marlins history and nudged the club into the playoffs in a full season for the first time since 2003 with the aid of deadline acquisitions Josh Bell and Jake Burger. The biggest aim of Ng and Schumacher was to change the culture and reverse their league-worst 24-40 record in one-run games, and they did that, going an MLB-best 33-14.
Instead of extending Ng, the Marlins effectively pushed out the game’s first female GM by declining to let her make staff changes and effectively demoting her by informing her they planned to hire someone above her to run baseball operations (not that they had anyone in mind). The weak offer to only pick up the 2024 option was a combo slap in the face/window dressing.
“It’s unreal after the year Kim had,” one Marlins person said in exasperation.
A ridiculous excuse was advanced in one place that higher-ups were “concerned” with drafts and player development, strange in that she wasn’t a decisionmaker in those areas until very recently. Meantime, insiders say the couple high-ranking analytics folks who remain had a deep imprint on the bad drafts and weak development for years, well before she ascended to become the true decisionmaker 18 months ago.
The analytics guys did well recommending pitchers Sandy Alcantara, Zac Gallen and Pablo Lopez but eventually soured on Lopez, pushing him to the trading block after claiming he didn’t strike out enough hitters, according to sources. As it turned out, they could not have been more wrong: Lopez finished second in the AL in strikeouts for Minnesota, where he went for Arraez.
Interestingly, sources say they weren’t especially sold at the time on Arraez, either, as they prefer hitters who “do damage.” So they didn’t like either guy in what amounted to the trade of the year.
Those folks were hired by long-deposed honcho Gary Denbo, seen as a “horror show” of a boss, a Marlins person said in a widely held opinion, bizarrely transitioning from kindly Yankees hitting coach. Organization sources say his guys also compounded their bad draft picks by overemphasizing launch angle, and the irony is Denbo was the hitting coach of former Marlins CEO Derek Jeter, one of the best contact hitters ever, before embracing launch angle.
However, one or more of Denbo’s guys apparently must have hypnotic charm as higher-ups were somehow convinced it was Ng’s fault the drafts were bad and the positional players didn’t develop when they weren’t her drafts and her development strategy had yet to be implemented. Anyway, good luck to them persuading Schumaker, said by others to be “beside himself” over Ng’s departure, that everything will be fine. To just about everyone, it appeared they were building something very positive together.