The Miami Marlins’ storybook run to the playoffs ends with sweep to Braves in NLDS
Matt Joyce made the long, slow walk from home plate back to the dugout at Houston’s Minute Maid Park. His line drive to right field landed in Christian Pache’s glove.
That was it. The Miami Marlins’ playoff run, their unexpectedly successful season in Year 3 of their rebuild under the Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter ownership group, was over.
They lost 7-0 to the Atlanta Braves on Thursday and were swept in the best-of-5 National League Division Series matchup following losses of 9-5 and 2-0 scores on Tuesday and Wednesday.
“They were better than us in this series,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said. “You have to tip your caps to what they’ve been able to do.”
But the Marlins know the accomplishments they’ve made this year even though they didn’t reach the end goal of a World Series.
They rose from being “Bottom Feeders” to being one of the great stories in baseball this season. They found themselves among the final eight teams playing in this weirdest of seasons played under the cloud of a pandemic.
On Thursday, it all came crashing down.
The Marlins, winners of World Series titles the only other times they reached the playoffs in 1997 and 2003, dropped their first playoff series in franchise history. The Braves, meanwhile, advance to the National League Championship Series for the first time since 2001.
“At the end of the day,” shortstop and de-facto captain Miguel Rojas said, “we have to be happy but not satisfied. We got a taste of the postseason and we know how to play in the playoffs now.”
Miami’s final defeat came pierced with another steady stream of hard hits from one of baseball’s best offenses. The Braves scored 18 combined runs over the series. They recorded 26 hits, 12 of which went for extra bases.
Sixto Sanchez, the Marlins’ top-ranked prospect and eventual front-end-of-the-rotation starting pitcher, was no match for this lineup despite a strong start. Sanchez needed five pitches to retire the side in the first but labored as he worked out of a bases-loaded and no outs jam in the second (with a big assist on a Corey Dickerson diving grab for the second out).
The Braves finally struck in the third. A Ronald Acuna Jr. walk, back-to-back singles from Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna, a Travis d’Arnaud two-run double and a Dansby Swanson sacrifice fly gave the Braves four runs and knocked Sanchez out of the game.
The Braves tacked on three more runs against Trevor Rogers on a fourth-inning Freeman single to left-center that, coupled with a Magneuris Sierra fielding error, scored Acuna from first and fifth-inning RBI hits from Swanson and Adam Duvall.
Miami’s offense, meanwhile, failed to take advantage of early opportunities. The Marlins had at least one runner in scoring position with less than two outs in each of the first three innings and in the ninth. They scored zero runs.
For the series, they went 3 for 20 with runners in scoring position, stranded 21 runners on base and were shut out for the final 19 innings.
It was a sobering end to a storybook run through this pandemic-shortened 2020 season. The Marlins, losers of 105 games in 2019 and 203 games combined over the past two seasons, were given a 0.2 percent chance to make the playoffs in March before the novel coronavirus pandemic shut down MLB for three-plus months and shortened the season from 162 games to 60.
The “Why Not Us?” rally cry formed from the team that had been confident from the start it could make noise this year after bringing in more than a half dozen veterans over the offseason and knowing the slew of top prospects they had acquired over the past two seasons were close to breaking through to the MLB level.
They overcame a week-long quarantine following their first series of the season after 18 players tested positive for COVID-19. They used 61 players, 18 of whom made their MLB debuts, and maneuvered around nearly 175 roster moves. The quarantine and postponed games resulted in the Marlins starting the season on a 23-day road trip and closing the regular season with 28 games over 24 days.
They still finished 31-29, posting their first winning season since 2009 and reaching the playoffs for the first time since 2003 due to the expanded field (the top two teams in each division plus the two best teams remaining in each league qualified for the postseason this year). They swept the Cubs in the best-of-3 wild card round to keep the magic going for a few more days.
“We’ve taken another step forward,” Mattingly said. “We know it’s not where we want to be, but we gave ourselves an opportunity this year.”
The opportunity for 2020 ended on Thursday but it set the stage for what’s to come in 2021.
“The window’s just opening for this team,” closer Brandon Kintzler said. “... Hopefully they can take advantage of it.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2020 at 5:38 PM.
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