Fish Food: Josh Beckett Arrested, Endless Trade Talk, Marlins Logo/Color Scheme

Josh Beckett hates when people mess up his favorite song

Former Marlins great and two-time World Series champion Josh Beckett was arrested last night on charges of public intoxication in his home state of Texas after “attacking a country band singer at an open mic night.”

Beckett is said to have injured his leg in the encounter, which he described as “horseplay,” but Beckett’s never been a small guy so the singer got the worst of it as you can imagine, suffering a torn rotator cuff and dislocated shoulder.

No word yet on which song the singer was butchering so badly that Beckett felt compelled to opposite-direction stage dive, but I hope it was worth a lot of money to him.

Trade Talk: Where does it end?

You can’t go a day at this point without hearing some sort of trade rumor connected to the Marlins. Most of the scuttlebutt is about Giancarlo Stanton, but Dee Gordon, Martin Prado, Christian Yelich, Marcell Ozuna, JT Realmuto and Dan Straily are also getting love from various arenas.

“Sources” within the Marlins organization say that Stanton, Gordon and Prado are the guys that are most assuredly on the move; sources have been wrong before. But it does jive with what Jeter has said publicly about his vision for the team moving foward, and reducing payroll to around $90 million would offset the $50 million in losses the franchise is expected to incur in 2018.

What we don’t know is if Marlins brass would stop there and attempt to build around the remaining talent on-hand, or if they would hit that big red reset button and purge the entire team. There is definitely some strategy in dangling the higher priced contracts out there first and holding back the lighter contracts that are assured to garner great prospect value in return.

Also, as has been noted before, trading the aforementioned trio only gets the Marlins to $90 million; they’d have to trim more in order to have some additional salary to play around with to field a complete team, let alone a competitive one.

These same sources that tell us (via the admittedly reliable veteran reporters at the Miami Herald) who is getting traded also suggest that Jeter wants to keep the relatively inexpensive talent around (aka the Realmutos of the world), but it’s going to be awfully difficult for Jeter, once some of those higher priced contracts are moved, to reject some of the shiny prospect packages that get placed in front of his eyes. Not to mention that the remaining team paired with whatever they can come up with rotation-wise might not be good enough to bother keeping together.

Suspiciously absent from the melee of trade rumors is one Justin Bour. His age (he’ll be 30 during much of 2018) and recent injury history might keep him from being mentioned among the team’s more lauded prizes such as Ozuna and Yelich, but he absolutely belongs in the conversation. Whether in Miami or elsewhere, he’ll play as a middle of order bat, presuming he can stay on the field.

If the club ultimately does decide to go the Cubs/Astros route (or as close to tanking as a non-NBA sport can get), the Marlins are going to need those payroll savings because a good chunk of the fanbase is going to tune out, again. They’ll have two seasons to show promise before the current TV deal expires in 2020. It’s a gamble, but if they time things right, the short term losses will be worth the long-term gain when the team is great, the fans are drawn back in like a magnet, and the franchise is finally at a profitable level. Everyone loves a winner.

Is it time to revisit the Marlins color/logo scheme again?

It can’t be too prominent in the minds of Jeter and company at the moment, with so much imminent roster churn on the horizon (not to mention the continued reshaping of the entire organization internally), but you have to imagine that, at some point, Jeter will turn his eyes to the current Marlins colors and logo scheme.

Put into place around the opening of Marlins Park in 2012, the new scheme embraced Miami specifically with a big “M” replacing the traditional “F” for Florida. The Marlin continues to swim around the top of the logo but is not quite so prominent, and the signature teal was largely replaced with a variation of black, orange, yellow, white and blue (which sometimes seems to break out into teal in the larger representations of the color).

The most recent color/logo scheme has drawn mixed reviews, and one has to wonder whether Jeter, in his quest to re-make the organization into a winner, wants to break away from the past in more ways than just turning over the roster. There was already immediate rumors once he took over that they were going to remove the home run sculpture (those have since been quelled), and then there was the somewhat brusque treatment of the Marlins legends who were let go. Basically, he has already demonstrated it’s not entirely out of the question that he may want to release a brand new, swanky set of colors to go along with the new look, presumably interesting Marlins circa 2020/2021, if not earlier.