How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Marlins?

Back on Opening Day, the Marlins' hopes were high. Armed with new uniforms, a new logo, and a new stadium, they were poised to be serious contenders. Their notoriously-cheap front office had spent almost $200 million in the offseason on big free agents. The outspoken Ozzie Guillen was hired to be the manager. The Marlins had finally ditched their old identity and arrived as major players on the baseball scene.

Jose Reyes, Heath Bell, and Mark Buehrle have all been
traded less than a year after signing in Miami.

Except, as it turns out, the Marlins were a terrible baseball team. They finished in last place and lost 93 games. By midseason, the front office decided to pull the plug on their failed experiment. They traded away many of their best players, including former star Hanley Ramirez, in July. They fired Guillen when the season came to a merciful end. They shipped embattled closer Heath Bell off to Arizona. And this Tuesday, the cleansing process was completed. The Marlins finalized a gargantuan trade with the Blue Jays, dealing away shortstop Jose Reyes, starting pitchers Mark Buehrle and Josh Johnson, infielder Emilio Bonifacio, and catcher John Buck in exchange for $160 million in salary relief and a gaggle of faceless prospects.

The Miami Marlins didn't take just a hatchet to their roster. They shook it like an Etch-a-Sketch, and poof--any evidence suggesting the 2012 Marlins ever existed was erased forever.

The results of this systematic purge are startling. Of all the players on that promising Opening Day roster, the following ones are no longer in the Miami organization: the catcher, first baseman, second baseman, third baseman, shortstop, center fielder, four-fifths of the starting rotation, top two bullpen arms, and the manager. The three marquee free agents signed last winter to so much hoopla--Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, and Heath Bell--are all gone. The payroll went from over $100 million in 2012 to a projected $25 million in 2013. And almost half of that figure is owed to one player, Ricky Nolasco, who is a free agent after next season (if he isn't traded before then). The only player the Marlins currently have signed to a major league contract in 2014 is Jeff Mathis, a catcher making $1.5 million. The rest of the roster? It's filled with somewhat-promising-but-unpolished prospects and minor league veterans making the league's minimum salary. The only notable exception is outfielder Giancarlo Stanton, who is poised to emerge as baseball's best young power hitter in a generation. But with the skeleton of a team surrounding him, why would he ever want to sign an extension to stay in Miami?

The future of Marlins baseball is extremely cloudy just twelve months after being so promising. The most hated owner in sports, Jeffrey Loria, basically just scammed the citizens of Miami for tens of millions of dollars. He lobbied for public money to fund his new stadium by promising to make the team competitive, and signed a hodgepodge of free agents to maintain his illusion. Then he dumped them all for cents on the dollar after just one tough year.

But here's the thing: from a baseball perspective, the Marlins did the right thing.

That old team, ingloriously dissolved, wasn't going anywhere. The hitting wasn't good enough, the pitching depth was awful, the bullpen was a sieve, its manager a joke. It was an expensive, poorly constructed roster, with flaws that were exacerbated by its bloated egos, personalities, and salaries. Why pretend that hideous construct of a baseball team had any shot of winning a title? Why not take that phone call from the Blue Jays and grab that opportunity to wipe the slate clean? Dozens of executives across all sports have often wished for the chance to press the 'reset' button and start over. The Marlins have been given that chance.

Yes, on paper, Miami got ripped off by the Blue Jays. They gave up five legitimate major league players, two of whom--Reyes and Johnson--can be great if healthy. In return, they received a lot of youth and no sure things. But if the Marlins aren't going to be good anyways, why continue to pay an aging and injury-prone Jose Reyes $20 million per year? Why wait around for Mark Buehrle's arm to fall off? Why not cash in on the final year of Josh Johnson's contract before he becomes a free agent after next year? So the Marlins didn't get any recognizable players back from Toronto. So what? They got $160 million off the books and brought in some interesting young players. They got a mulligan.

The problem is that it looks bad when a scumbag owner trades away all of his team's good players for a bag of peanuts. It looks even worse when that owner vowed to improve his team while lobbying for a taxpayer-funded stadium. But just like the Red Sox when they traded away Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, and Carl Crawford, the Marlins did the right thing, as lopsided as the trade might seem. They have erased the mistakes of offseasons past. Those mistakes could have crippled the franchise for years. Instead, the Marlins have been given a rare opportunity: a fresh start. A chance to learn from those embarrassing mistakes and build from scratch.

What will they do with that chance? Now that's another matter entirely.