2026 Team Previews: Miami Marlins
A detailed fantasy baseball oriented team preview of the 2026 Miami Marlins
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Podcast
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Intro
The Marlins are in a decent spot right now. They got through the Tommy John surgeries to Alcantara and Eury Perez, and the future of the rotation looks pretty bright with the potential of guys like Ryan Weathers, Robby Snelling, and Thomas White. This is an organization that seems to be able to find and develop pitching talent.
The offense has been a struggle, but with Agustin Ramirez and Kyle Stowers breaking out last season, things are a bit brighter on that front as well. This could be a pretty good team in 2027 and beyond, and I would bet on them for 75 or so wins in 2026.
Let’s get into all of the fantasy-relevant players from the Marlins ahead of 2026.
Hitters
Agustin Ramirez
Age: 24
Pos: C
Agustin got to the Majors pretty early on last year, debuting on April 21st. Like most rookies, there were good moments, and there were bad. Unlike most rookies, though, Ramirez proved to be a standard league player right out of the gate. He finished as the C7 in standard roto leagues.
This shows you what 16 steals can do for you. That was a ton of steals for the catcher position, and he’ll project for the most steals at the position this year. The 21 bombs were also quite nice. The issue was a .230 batting average.
The batting average really cratered after his first couple of months. I don’t know if he tired out, or if pitchers kinda figured something out, or some mixture of things. But he hit .198 in July, .218 in August, and .221 in September.
Luckily for his fantasy value, he hit nine homers and stole fifteen bags in those final three months.
The most intriguing thing about Agustin is his combination of power and contact. The 19.4% K% and 11% Brl% are very strong, and the .339 xwOBA checks out as well.
In the zone, he had an 86.3% contact rate. Very strong stuff, and he is swinging the bat hard (89th percentile). The batted ball profile:
It’s not elite here, but you don’t have any big issues. A 15.9% Air Pull% is fine, and a 46% GB% is also fine.
Overall, these are impressive numbers for a guy in his first go-around against Major League pitching. But remember that the league did handle him a lot better late, so he’ll have to make some adjustments.
The most important part of his fantasy profile next year is the steals. I don’t suspect he’ll be stealing 15 bags five years from now, that just doesn’t seem to be how catchers go (although he also might not be a catcher at all in a couple of years). He is not a fast player with 36th-percentile sprint speed. But his swiping bags wasn’t new this year. Ramirez stole 22 bags in 2024 with a 17% attempt rate. That’s a good sign. But with the lack of actual speed, I could definitely see him coming in a handful of bags below the projections.
But you have a lot of tools here. Not many guys make this kind of contact with this kind of bat speed in addition to being willing to steal bags. He’ll also DH quite a bit, and who knows, maybe he’ll end up their everyday first baseman this year. That’s all very good news for his playing time. I think he’s a 140+ game guy. If he does that, he’ll hit 25 homers and probably still steal ten bags at least. It could be a very, very good fantasy season.
But the downside is that the batting average stays very low, the homers come in around 20, and he steals only a handful of bases. That kind of season would be pretty replaceable. But overall, I’m PRO Agustin. This upside is that he separates from the field at the position (besides Raleigh, I suppose).
Projection
450 PA, 59 R, 20 HR, 59 RBI, 11 SB, .260/.316/.471
Ranking
Kyle Stowers
Age: 28
Pos: OF
Stowers did a lot of damage in his 117 games. 25 bombs on a .288 batting average, and he threw in five steals.
This season came out of nowhere. I don’t know if the Marlins tapped into something or if they just got lucky to have him hit the breakout after they acquired him for Trevor Rogers. His season ended on August 15th, so there were 30+ games he didn’t play at the end of the season.
It was a season of streaks. He was awesome early on, had a pretty rough cold streak between May and June, but had a massive July to get everybody back on board.
Ten bombs in July with a .364/.451/.818 slash line. Let’s look at some of the underlying marks:
A 108.1 EV90 is great, no problems there.
We have some problems with the contact. A 27.5% K% is very high, and the 75.3% Zone-Contact% is extra scary. He whiffs a ton. The .277 xBA was good, but he relied on a .354 BABIP to get there. The sweet spot rate of 40% was high. He just didn’t miss on contact.
I always expect regression on batted ball stuff. I’m not saying he’ll go back to what he looked like with the Orioles, I just think this K% could end up around 30%, and the home run rate could drop for that reason and because of a higher rate of mishit baseballs.
The thing I’m not buying is going to be Stowers as a good batting average bat. To me, he’s a little bit of an “empty power” bat in a sub-par lineup. If he falls to a .260 hitter with 20-25 homers and 3-6 steals, that’s a pretty replaceable bat.
And that’s about what the projections are saying, although on a very conservative PA projection.
Projection
494 PA, 65 R, 22 HR, 68 RBI, 5 SB, .259/.331/.478
Ranking
I won’t be too into Stowers. I am always hesitant about these late-career breakouts, especially when they do it on a limited number of games and are powered by a couple of big hot streaks.
Jakob Marsee
Age: 24
Pos: OF
I have been almost wrestling with the projection model about Jakob Marsee. He’s in that weird sweet spot of having just enough MLB data to use for projecting, but not enough to avoid getting a weird projection if things are a certain way.
And things are a certain way with Marsee. His MLB performance was impressive:
→ 55 GP, 234 PA, .292/.363/.478, 5 HR, 14 SB, 20.5% K%, 9.4% BB%
He was immediately the Marlins’ best hitter upon joining the lineup, but it was a steady downtrend from the beginning. The guy had a 1.058 OPS in August and then a .619 mark in September.
Let’s check the minor league stuff from 2024-2025:
→ 1,032 PA, .219/.359/.366, 21% K%, 15.5 BB%, 24 HR, 98 SB
fScores:
We like the discipline and the speed, but we wouldn’t have expected this guy to hit many homers.
Let’s look at more Major League data:
→ 8.0% Brl%
→ 104.6 EV90
→ 111.1 Max EV
→ 40% Sweet Spot%
→ 44% GB%
→ 9.9% Air Pull%
→ 87.3% Zone-Contact%
→ .352 xwOBA
His bat speed was below league average (69.9mph vs. 71.5 league average, the way I judge it). But he made a high-quality contact. The guy was getting the ball on the right spot of the bat and hitting it at good angles. A lot of that stuff is subject to regression. We’re talking about just 162 balls in play from him in the Majors last year.
His 38% GB% in AAA and 17.7% Air Pull% is good news. With the lack of bat speed and exit velocity stuff, he will need to pull fly balls to get to the 15+ homers we’d like to get from a steals guy.
But he is a steals guy. He’s gone for a career 35% stolen base attempt rate while swiping 46, 51, and 61 bags in the last three years (combining all levels). He is not going to be winning any sprinting competitions with 68th-percentile sprint speed, but it hasn’t held him back. He’s an aggressive base stealer, and that was true in the Majors last year as well. To this point, he’s been able to get on base a ton. That’s partly because he’s a very patient hitter.
A 43% Swing% (that’s from the Majors last year) is pretty low, but not so low that you’d worry about him being too patient. His chase rate is in line with his overall swing rate, which is fine. What you really don’t want is a guy with a low swing rate and a higher chase rate.
His swing decisions are nothing Seager-like, but they’re solid, especially since it was his first look at MLB pitching.
This truly is the toughest kind of player to project. The guy who has played about half of a season in the Majors. There are a lot of good numbers here, but they’re all subject to falling apart in a hurry if they were driven by luck last year, or if the league’s pitchers adjust and figure him out a bit.
A lot of people will see the .279 xBA and .352 xwOBA and then not worry at all about the .357 BABIP. I’m not sure that’s right. xBA is subject to small sample problems just like anything else. Just because this guy hit a high number of line drives and balls in the proper angle range in his first 162 balls in play doesn’t mean that’s guaranteed to happen next year. The guy’s .239 career minor league batting average certainly tells you something about that. He hit .246 in the minors last year and then .292 in the Majors.
I’d be expecting a .250 batting average or so next year. I’d be pretty surprised if he maintains a high batting average. But I do believe the guy will take walks, steal bags, and hit double-digit homers if he stays in that Marlins lineup all year.
I would not advise anybody draft him as early as my projection model might tell you to, but I will be in on the guy as a deep league outfielder. I think the floor is decent with that plate discipline and work on the basepaths.
Projection
558 PA, 72 R, 16 HR, 57 RBI, 40 SB, .259/.352/.419, 22% K%, 10.6% BB%
Projections should just be the computer. I’m not into making my own hand-written projections. But in this, I’ll do it. This is probably a better projection:
→ .255/.335/.405, 14 HR, 28 SB
Something like that! I’ll be very interested to see what The Bat and ATC think about him. Here’s Steamer, the only other system we have:
541 PA, 70 R, 12 HR, 46 RBI, 33 SB, .232/.330/.372, 22.5% K%, 11.7% B%
Ranking
Xavier Edwards
Age: 26
Pos: SS
I appreciate guys like Xavier Edwards. We know who he is and what he’ll do. At least we know what he’ll do with a higher degree of confidence than with most players. Edwards has played less than two seasons’ worth of MLB games, but we can still figure him out.
Very little power, plenty of steals, and a high batting average driven by a low strikeout rate and a good line drive rate. He went for a .260 xBA last year (although that is not adjusted for his speed), going for a 49% GB%, a 20% FB%, a 35% Sweet Spot%, and a .328 BABIP.
There’s variance in batted ball profiles. You can never say for sure that a guy will hit for a certain batting average. But Edwards is the type of guy you feel good about. You see the difference between 2024 (.328) and 2025 (.282). I’d say .280 is a fine expectation, and there’s plenty of upside from there.
His 91.8% Zone Contact% gets him to at least a .270 batting average, I’d say. You have to be really bad with the launch angles and/or very unlucky to not hit for a good batting average while making that kind of contact.
With his utter lack of power (0.8% Brl%, 100.5 EV90), pitchers have no reason not to throw him strikes. He’s not a threat to take you deep, and a walk is often like a double after he steals second base. For that reason, it was easy to see his 11% BB% from 2024 falling in 2025, which it did down to 7.9%. That’s still a higher walk rate than I might think. He has a good enough eye to take walks when the pitchers make their mistakes (but none of the walks are on purpose by the pitchers).
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