It was the Miami Marlins ‘against the world’ in 2020. The end result: A playoff berth.
Brandon Kintzler had the bases loaded, one out and the batter he wanted at the plate. Shortstop Miguel Rojas stood behind him, ready to make a play.
DJ LeMahieu, in the running for MLB’s batting title, chopped Kintzler’s 92 mph sinker over the mound and just to the right of second base.
“He did exactly what I wanted him to do, exactly what I planned, exactly what I had seen him do before,” Kintzler said. “The guy’s a great hitter, but that’s just for me a great situation.”
Rojas darted to grab the ball. Rojas tapped his foot on second base and fired to Jesus Aguilar at first base for the inning-ending double play.
The Miami Marlins beat the New York Yankees 4-3 in 10 innings on Friday. The dugout clears. The celebration begins. A 16-year drought comes to an end.
The Miami Marlins, for the first time since 2003 and just the third time in franchise history, are heading to the playoffs. They are the National League East runners-up, a spot that ensures a postseason berth in 2020’s expanded playoff field. The playoff drought was the longest in the NL and second longest in MLB, only behind the Mariners, who last reached the playoffs in 2001.
The Marlins’ return to the postseason came with a win against the same team they beat to win the 2003 World Series and the same team Marlins manager Don Mattingly and CEO Derek Jeter played with for their entire careers. It also came on the six-year anniversary of Jeter’s final home game as a Yankees player and the four-year anniversary of pitcher Jose Fernandez’s death.
Mattingly’s wife, Lori, sent Mattingly a photo of him and Fernandez on Friday morning.
“I’ve got a bracelet that I’ve worn ever since with his number on it that I never really take off,” Mattingly said pregame. “Changed my exercise programs to instead of 15 reps, 16 reps for his number. It is an emotional day. You think back about Jose and what he meant and just what kind of spirit he was. It would be a great day no matter what, but it would obviously be something that would be special [to clinch the playoff berth Friday].”
This run to the playoffs wasn’t supposed to happen, if the outsiders were to be believed.
The Marlins were coming off a 105-loss season and had lost 203 games the past two years overall since the start of the rebuild led by the Bruce Sherman and Jeter ownership group.
This is a team that was given a 0.2 percent chance to make the playoffs heading into spring training, a team that spent a week quarantined after 18 players tested positive for COVID-19, a team that had 18 players make MLB debuts and made nearly 175 roster moves, a team that had a 23-day road trip to start the season and is on a 24-day stretch with 28 games to end the season.
And this is a team making its way to the postseason.
“We’ve had to fight for it,” Mattingly said, “and I told our guys the other day, we walked into spring training and there wasn’t one expert out there that didn’t pick us last. I didn’t see one place where we weren’t picked to be last in the East. But our guys didn’t believe that. And that’s the main thing. It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. If you believe in something different, you can make that happen.”
As the celebration commenced at Yankee Stadium, the Marlins’ shirts sent a loud message.
“RESPECT MIAMI,” they read in all capital letters.
“Hopefully,” Mattingly said, “this is the very beginning of it.”
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‘We’re gonna go for it’
The Marlins set that mentality from the time they step foot onto the field at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium Complex in Jupiter for spring training.
“We want to make noise,” Mattingly said back in February.
“I expect our guys to be competitive right now,” Jeter added a week into Grapefruit League games.
The goal was re-emphasized when baseball activities picked back up in June following the a three-plus-month layoff due to the coronavirus pandemic that also shortened the regular season to 60 games. Calls of “Why Not Us?” resonated through the rebuilding organization.
“We’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Marlins ace Sandy Alcantara said at the time.
Mattingly took it a step further: “We’re in the mode of ‘We’re gonna go for it.’ That’s gonna be the first priority.”
Most shrugged off the assertions. It’s preseason optimism. Nobody has played yet. So, yes, why not the Marlins? After a few weeks, the thought would go, the Marlins would be back at their all-to-familiar place at the bottom of the division.
But, to the Marlins, this wasn’t lip service. As the season drew closer, they saw the pieces they had, the talent they had, even if others shrugged them off.
Mainstays like Rojas, Brian Anderson, Jorge Alfaro, Alcantara and Pablo Lopez were primed for big seasons. There was hope Lewis Brinson would finally figure things out at the plate.
Offseason acquisitions in Corey Dickerson, Jesus Aguilar, Kintzler, Yimi Garcia, Francisco Cervelli, Matt Joyce and Brad Boxberger brought a veteran presence to a youth-laden clubhouse. Outfielder Starling Marte, acquired at trade deadline, would eventually join that list.
Top prospects were on the cusp of their big-league debuts. Many of them were brought into the organization through trades that shipped off top players Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna, J.T. Relamuto and Dee Gordon.
The two years of painstaking struggles, the Marlins hoped, were about to pay off.
“They wanted to build sustainable winners,” said Rojas, one of the rare veteran holdovers from before the ownership change. “This is the first step in that.”
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‘Us against the world’
For Kintzler, the dream started to feel like it could become reality on Aug. 4. The Marlins were in Baltimore, set to play their first game in nine days. They had been cooped up in a Philadelphia hotel for a week after a COVID-19 outbreak occurred inside their traveling party, the result of a “false sense of security and comfort” in Jeter’s words after a successful summer camp in Miami.
They were missing 18 players and two coaches because of the coronavirus. Another player, Isan Diaz, opted out. The 13 players who tested negative throughout — “Los Treces” as they became known among the team — had just two formal practices before getting back into live games. Mattingly had to work with a roster that included players he didn’t formally meet until the game started.
The Marlins won that first game back, 4-0. They swept the four-game, three-day series with the Orioles. Their second chance was here. They were taking advantage of it.
“I’ve been playing a long time,” Kintzler said Friday. “but I’ve never been part of a group that was that tight that wanted to fight together. That’s my mentality. I always want to fight. It’s me against the world. And it was us against the world. Everyone was already mad at us, thinking that we messed up for getting COVID. We just came together.”
Anderson put it more succinctly in the moment after winning the Orioles series: “We’re gonna take it to some teams.”
The Marlins went through the usual ebbs and flows of a season — a five-game losing streak here, winning five of seven there — but somehow managed to win the key games to keep the season afloat.
Some examples:
▪ Aug. 21: The Marlins made their way to Washington, D.C., for a five-game series against the Nationals. Miami was on a five-game losing streak and were sitting at .500 on the season. Rojas, the first of the 18 players to return from COVID-19, belts a three-run home run in his first at-bat to lift the Marlins to a 3-2 victory. Miami went on to take three of five games in the set and opened their next series against the Mets by sweeping a doubleheader.
▪ Aug. 31: The Marlins were swept at home in a three-game series with the Tampa Bay Rays and now had to make a day trip up to New York to make up their final game against the Mets that was postponed four days earlier to protest racial injustice. It was supposed to be one of Miami’s final two off days of the season as part of a five-game homestand. Instead, a trek to Citi Field and another battle with Jacob deGrom. The Marlins won 5-3 and went into the final month of the year with a .500 record.
“That was a sore spot, and that could have led to a lot of complaining,” Mattingly said after that game. “But it’s one of those things that we have to get past. We talked about it a little bit. We’re going. It’s the way it is. We’re playing. We’re going. We’re not going to hang our heads.”
▪ Sept. 10: Miami was just handed a historical loss, 29-9, by the Braves in Atlanta. A 15-game, 11-day homestand with four doubleheaders and no off days awaited them. How they fared over this week and a half would determine their playoff fate.
The Marlins begin with a 7-6, walk-off victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, the team nipping at their heels for second place in the division. They take five of seven against Philadelphia and go 9-6 overall on the homestand.
▪ Thursday: The Marlins are wrapping up a four-game series with the Braves at Truist Park. They are on a four-game losing streak. A loss here means they are tied with the Phillies for second place in the NL East going into the final three days of the season. The game is delayed more than 90 minutes as rain soaks the field. Pablo Lopez, who 15 days earlier started the 29-9 loss, throws five scoreless innings and the offense picks up in the sixth. Miami wins 4-2.
“These are stressful games,” Mattingly said. “I don’t think there’s any getting around it. I’ve had teams that have had seven- and eight-game leads with 15 to play, and for guys, it’s different. They’re tough games to play. Again, it’s a good experience for us and for our guys to be playing this style.”
▪ Friday: The opportunity is here. The Marlins can clinch the playoff berth with a win over the Yankees and a Phillies loss to the Rays. Marlins players kept an eye on the scoreboard and they jumped out to a 3-0 lead on a Garrett Cooper home run and Alcantara kept New York’s high-octane offense at bay before a late rally forced extra innings. Kintzler, with a smile on his face despite a disdain for MLB’s extra inning rule this season that automatically has a runner start on second base, gets himself into and out of a bases-loaded jam. Miami wins 4-3.
To the postseason they go.
“I think we played better when our backs were against the wall,” Kintzler said, “when we have to get a win and everyone’s looking at us.”
Everyone will be looking at the Marlins when their best-of-3 wild card series begins Wednesday. Who they play is still to be determined as the standings get finalized.
But don’t expect this team to be complacent with just making it to the playoffs.
“We started this,” Alcantara said, “and we’ve got to finish.”
The Marlins are confident, just like they were back in February when everyone else automatically ruled them out. Their opportunity is here.
“We’re a team that’s playing loose,” Kintzler said. “We’ve got nothing to lose. We’re playing with house money. We can go win. We can make some noise. We’re a dangerous team. ... We really don’t care if anyone says we’re overachievers. I mean, why are we overachievers? Because some experts thought we weren’t going to win? We knew we were going to win the whole time.”
This story was originally published September 26, 2020 at 11:17 AM.
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