Marlins executive Larry Beinfest was seated toward the back of a large ballroom at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas on Thursday, waiting for the start of the Rule 5 Draft — a scavenger hunt of sorts and the traditional last item on the agenda at baseball’s winter meetings — looking disinterested and fatigued.

It had been an exhausting week for Beinfest and the Marlins. They had signed three top players, doggedly pursued two others, including Albert Pujols, and walked out with a haul that in sheer dollars surpassed anything the Marlins have ever done before.

• Jose Reyes for $106 million.

• Mark Buehrle for $58 million.

• Heath Bell for $27 million.

Total: $191 million.

It was a staggering sum given the Marlins’ spendthrift history of sifting through debris to construct low-budget rosters, and it stood in 180-degree contrast to the winter meetings of 2005 when they showed up at the very same Dallas hotel to tear apart, not to build.

They were coming off what Beinfest still considers his most disappointing season as the Marlins’ chief architect (“I think that team was ready to win. I thought it had everything, and it didn’t win.”), and he was given orders to take a wrecking ball to the roster.

By the time Beinfest arrived in Dallas in ’05, he had already traded Carlos Delgado, Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, Luis Castillo, Guillermo Mota and Paul Lo Duca. By the time he left, Juan Pierre was gone, too.

“All that was left after we left here was Ron Villone,” Beinfest recalled. “He was the last piece to go. We did him at the [team’s] holiday party. That was the end.”

It would be inaccurate to call this past week’s flurry of signings a beginning. After all, the Marlins are still banking on existing players, from Hanley Ramirez to Josh Johnson, from Mike Stanton to Gaby Sanchez, to create wins for the newly named Miami Marlins and their new ballpark. The everyday lineup, assuming no further moves are made between now and April 4 when they face the Pujols-less Cardinals, will be identical to last season’s unit with one exception: Reyes.

Likewise, the starting staff will be the same five pitchers that filled out last season’s rotation at the start, again with just one exception: Buehrle instead of Javier Vazquez. The bullpen has Bell as its closer instead of Juan Carlos Oviedo, the reliever formerly known as Leo Nuñez. Otherwise, it too is largely the same.

And, yet, with those bold strokes, many think the Marlins are now a viable threat to pry loose the Philadelphia Phillies from their five-year stranglehold on the National League East while also fending off the Atlanta Braves and emerging Washington Nationals.

“I think it’s the right time,” said John Kruk, an ESPN Baseball Tonight analyst. “... The Marlins, if they want to compete with the Phillies and Braves had to makes themselves better. They couldn’t stick with what they had.”

Said former general manager Jim Bowden, who is now a baseball analyst for ESPN and XM/Sirius radio: “The package of that trifecta is well beyond what people think. The best part of the three acquisitions has nothing to do with talent. Their makeup and character is so ridiculous that it makes everyone around them better. This team right now is a wild-card contender.”