No. 22: Miami Marlins

I hope that the Marlins fans among you will forgive that my question, below, leads to a fascinating—but admittedly unrelated—bit of baseball insight from Joey Votto. At the same time, I also know that any essay that leads to Joey Votto, is, by definition, awesome and requires no apologies.

Before we get to the Marlins and Joey, I did want to mention two things: One, my pal Tom Tango is running a game that, I suspect, will be incredibly fun for all of you and will probably make you waste a LOT of time: He’s matching up team nicknames. Tell your friends you have plans for the rest of the day.

And two, yes, I’m hoping to boost subscriptions a bit, coming into the new baseball season. In that spirit, I’m making two offers:

1. We’re going to continue our special 20% offer right up to Opening Day.

2. I’ve heard from a growing number of people who would love to subscribe but for various reasons—they’re down on their luck at the moment, they’re kids, etc.—cannot afford to subscribe. I give away as many of these as I can, but I do have two kids in college, so, you know… this is where you come in. You can donate subscriptions here. I’m coming up with prizes I’m going to give to people who donate subs.

And now, on to the matter at hand…

Is what the Marlins did in 2023 repeatable?

There is a percentage of readers here at JoeBlogs who do not like it when I call a team like the 2023 Marlins “lucky.” I hear from them now and again, and I get it. If you think about it, just about all of the surprising stories in sports rely, at least a little bit, on fortune, chance, a twist of fate, serendipity and, yes, luck. Take the greatest sports story, perhaps, in American history: The 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Do the Americans win that game against the Soviets if coach Victor Tikhonov doesn’t lose his mind at the end of the first period and pull legendary goaltender Vladislav Tretiak?

I’ve posed that question to Tretiak himself, and he offered two answers.

1. We can never know the true answer to such questions.

2. No.

The Marlins, you might recall, went to the playoffs in 2023 despite being dead last in the National League in runs scored and being outscored overall by 57 runs. This was unusual—the Marlins had the worst run differential for any team that has made the playoffs—but there are precedents. I tried to look at every team that was outscored by 50-plus runs this century so far—I counted 250 or so*—and found that four of them had winning records.

*I will admit that the process I used wasn’t perfect; I think I included a few too many teams. But I can see with confidence there were somewhere between 200 and 250 teams outscored by at least 50 runs, and only four of them had winning records

The four teams to have winning records while being outscored by 50-plus?