I've decided that I am going to defend the Marlins and their ownership on this move.
Suppose you are the Marlins. You are one of the less profitable teams in baseball and your players usually leave once they are FA's, but you are pretty good at IDing and developing prospects, and you just spent a lot of money on FA's. But the chemistry or whatever just didn't work out, and you didn't contend with all those FA's on your team.
Do you:
(1) Keep them and their backloaded contracts on the books, hoping that magic will somehow strike the same group differently, and risking those contracts becoming untradeable?
(2) Do something else?
The Marlins did something else. For whatever reason, the current crew wasn't getting it done, so they dumped them (along with players likely to become FA's and leave soon), reloaded with prospects, and cleaned up $80 million in payroll. Now, you have a new core to rebuild around, and the option to sign FA help around that core once you see a window opening up.
The Marlins, in my view, are one of the most shrewdly managed teams in baseball. It doesn't always work out, but they're highly Vulcan-like. Dismantling the 1997 and 2003 WS teams was shrewd: most teams don't repeat the same performance the next season and players are at their peak after a WS win. Compare the 1997 Marlins to, say, the 2002 Angels, who kept everyone and became a mediocre team.
No, there's no justifying this.
- According to Forbes (3/2012), the Marlins were more profitable than the Giants, Tigers, Mariners, Dodgers, Angels, Phillies, and Mets for the previous season, in a football stadium, and have not posted a loss since 2006.
- They didn't spend a lot of money on free agents, they signed free agents to contracts somebody else will pay
- There is no chemistry argument when the sell-off begins after a half-season
- They have a year-old, half-billion dollar stadium, and currently <$20 million in 2013 payroll
- The Marlins ownership was completely different in 1997 and had barely had owned the team a year in 2003
- They've never won the division and haven't been to the postseason since 2003, while the Angels went to the postseason 5 of the next 7 years after 2002. So the Marlins compare quite poorly to them.
