Peter Bendix: Marlins’ farm system ‘has a lot of room to improve.’ Where things stand
After 15 years as a member of the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office, new Miami Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix knows the importance of a strong minor-league system. Teams that generally run on low payrolls, like the Marlins and Rays, need to be able to develop from within if they want to win on a regular basis.
“It doesn’t matter what our payroll is,” Bendix said. “Our farm system is really important. It’s the lifeblood of what we do.”
So after nearly three months on the job with the Marlins and having a chance to see where the organization stands, how would Bendix evaluate the Marlins’ farm system?
“It has a lot of room to improve,” Bendix said last week in an interview with the Miami Herald.
The Marlins’ minor-league system currently is underwhelming compared to the rest of MLB. The team has just one prospect who is a consensus top-100 prospect in the league: 2023 first-round pick Noble Meyer, who is ranked No. 48 by Baseball America and No. 57 by MLB Pipeline.
Of Miami’s top 30 prospects as ranked by Baseball America, only six have MLB experience or finished last season in Triple A: Max Meyer, Xavier Edwards, Dane Myers, Jacob Amaya, Troy Johnston and Anthony Maldonado. Moreover, eight of the top 30 were part of the 2023 draft class and 11 others have yet to play above High A.
“To have sustainable success is to have a farm system that is constantly giving you another wave of players to add to your roster,” Bendix said, “and I don’t think we’re at that point yet.”
Now, to be fair, this season was all but guaranteed to be a rebuilding phase in the minor leagues after the Marlins traded seven top prospects during the course of 2023 to acquire six players for their MLB roster that made the playoffs for the first time in 20 years.
Five of those players they acquired — Luis Arraez, Josh Bell, Jake Burger, A.J. Puk and Ryan Weathers — are still with the organization, with all but Bell under team control beyond the 2024 season.
But that said, the Marlins’ track record for player development has been lackluster under the Bruce Sherman ownership group.
The Marlins only have six players on their 40-man roster who were drafted or signed as international free agents under the Sherman ownership group that have made their MLB debuts: Pitchers Eury Perez, Max Meyer, Andrew Nardi and Bryan Hoeing; catcher Nick Fortes; and outfielder Peyton Burdick.
Four others — pitchers Braxton Garrett, Edward Cabrera, Trevor Rogers and George Soriano — are homegrown talent that were already in the organization when Sherman took over in October 2017.
Bendix has invested his share of time during the past two-plus months to bolster the Marlins’ minor-league infrastructure. That includes two front-office hires in Gabe Kapler as a fourth assistant general manager and Rachel Balkovec as the team’s director of player development — a position the organization kept vacant last year after dismissing Geoff DeGroot late in the 2022 season.
Kapler spent three seasons as a director of player development for the Los Angeles Dodgers before spending six seasons as an MLB manager, first with the Philadelphia Phillies (2018-2019) and then with the San Francisco Giants (2020-2023).
Balkovec, 36, spent the past two seasons as the manager of the Tampa Tarpons, the Single A affiliate for the New York Yankees. She was the first woman to work as a full-time manager for an MLB-affiliated team. Balkovec also previously served as the hitting coach for the Yankees’ Florida Complex League team and as a minor-league strength and conditioning coach — the first woman to hold both of those titles in a full-time capacity.
Bendix said the Marlins hired Balkovec out of more than a dozen candidates for the job.
“Her background is very hard to find. She has a lot of different perspectives — education, experience, a lot of different components of player development that she’s participated in — and a lot and it’s really hard to find that one person,” Bendix said. “And then you layer on top of that person that she is and how well she connects with the players and how well she’s able to push, innovate and drive things forward. It’s really hard to find all of that one person that really fits what we’re looking to do.”
This story was originally published January 29, 2024 at 12:38 PM.
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