Eight days off. 17 new players. A win. The Marlins’ goal now: ‘Just keep playing’
Jesus Aguilar, in the eighth inning of the Miami Marlins’ first game after an eight-day layoff, did what he does best at the plate.
He caught hold of a 3-0 fastball over the heart of the plate from Orioles reliever Thomas Eshelman and drilled it over the left-field wall for a 416-foot home run. Aguilar stood just off home plate for a few seconds, admiring his work. His teammates in the dugout broke the silence of the empty ballpark at Camden Yards, mimicking sirens as he rounded the bases.
“It was like Opening Day for us,” Aguilar said.
Finally, the discussion surrounding the Marlins is focusing on baseball again.
Finally, the Marlins are back in their natural habitat, playing on a baseball field for a few hours a day instead of sprints down hotel hallways and bullpen sessions featuring sanitary socks and mattress pads.
Finally, they’re back to some semblance of normal when there is still so much abnormal to wade through.
The Marlins’ roster has 17 new faces. Eighteen others are quarantining in South Florida after testing positive for COVID-19 on this road trip that started more than two weeks ago. Most of the group that tested positive is asymptomatic, and no one has experienced more than “mild” symptoms, according to CEO Derek Jeter.
The team spent an extra week at their team hotel in Philadelphia to get the outbreak under control and prepare for their eventual resumption of the season.
A makeshift, motley crew of a roster is doing what it can to keep alive the team’s original goal of being a dark horse playoff contender in a shortened season.
“We don’t want to keep talking about everything,” manager Don Mattingly said. “We’ve got to move on. It’s good to get back on the field, and it’s time to move forward and talk about baseball.”
That started with the Marlins’ 4-0 win against the Orioles on Tuesday. The win improved them to 3-1 and, based on winning percentage, has them atop the National League East.
It continues with their doubleheader Wednesday — the first of two seven-inning games in Baltimore starts at 5 p.m. with the second beginning a half hour after the first game ends — and their series finale against the Orioles on Thursday. It then extends another six days as the team plays its regularly scheduled road series against the New York Mets and the Blue Jays in Buffalo, New York, before the Marlins finally return to Miami.
“We have to [keep looking ahead],” said Aguilar, whose eighth-inning home run capped scoring in the win on Tuesday. “We don’t have a choice. We’ve been through a lot. Stay positive. Just keep playing.”
And when given the opportunity on Tuesday, they kept playing.
They did so with team leader Miguel Rojas, three more starting position players, three members of their starting rotation and eight members of their bullpen unavailable as they go through their quarantine period.
But they played as if they had not been off the field for more than week.
Pablo Lopez, more than a week after his season debut was originally supposed to take place against this same Orioles team, threw five shutout innings. He struck out seven, allowed two hits and walked zero.
Francisco Cervelli broke open a scoreless ballgame with a solo home run in the top of the fifth. The offense used small ball to add two more runs in the sixth before Aguilar’s home run in the eight put a bow on the outing. The bullpen, two new faces in James Hoyt and Richard Bleier and two familiar ones in Brad Boxberger and Brandon Kintzler, combined for four scoreless innings to close out the contest.
“We didn’t quite know how we were going to react,” Mattingly said. “You get tested and you have to persevere and you learn from a lot of situations. We knew we had a good group of guys.”
Even if Mattingly didn’t personally know a few of them before getting to the ballpark on Tuesday.
All of the team’s meetings since arriving in Baltimore were done via Zoom. Mattingly spent some time with the relievers during pregame warmups just so he could give a proper introduction to the new players he’ll be relying on to help them for the immediate future.
The team looks different, but the mentality, Mattingly said, remains the same.
“We expect to win,” Mattingly said.
“We miss our guys that are gone, Miggy and the boys. We just have to try to hold down the fort, survive this trip and see where we’re at.”
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 11:59 AM.
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