FanPost Friday: Redrafting the Miami Marlins

Many sites around SB Nation host FanPost Fridays, and we’re joining the fray here at Fish Stripes, because we want to give you the chance to have your voice be heard in long-form style.

Every Friday, we’ll post a FanPost prompt to type a response to. All you have to do to participate is click on the FanPosts button at the top of the blog (next to the site icon) and then select new FanPost, and voila! It’s fairly straightforward, but please feel free to reach out if you ever have any questions about the FanPost process.

If a FanPost is well-written enough, we may decide to promote it to the front page and spread it around on our social media channels, seriously amplifying your awesome opinion’s reach. So, what are you waiting for? Get to it!

FanPost Friday prompt: Draft the entire Marlins organization in the same style as the NFL Draft. Who is your #1 Pick? Who is Mr. Irrelevant?

Last week’s prompt: What is your favorite baseball card and why? Is there a story attached to any in your collection?

The NFL Draft is one of my favorite nights in all of sports. In a way, it’s like Christmas morning for NFL fans and college fans get the warm fuzzy feeling of delivering the presents. Every professional team gets to have at least a sliver of optimism for the future of their respective franchise. Meanwhile, the college viewer gets to see the well-deserved playoff for student athletes that represented their favorite bastion of higher education.

While there is an MLB Draft, it is different from the NFL version on a variety of levels. If the NFL Draft is Mardi Gras then the MLB Draft is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Our clean, well-dressed draft is produced in a way that doesn’t deliver the same je nais se quoi of Mel Kiper Jr.’s raving hand waving. Additionally, baseball (and basketball) executives feed off of analytics departments that most of the NFL doesn’t yet endorse.

Just imagine Bob McNair and Jerry Jones reading Beyond the Box Score or chatting it up with Bill James. Let that stream of thoughts just process and relish the hypotheticals.

In the context of the Marlins, the team is now exiting the Lorian Era. That mentality, one of developing homegrown, beloved talent and then trading them off as they begin their career’s epitasis, is long gone. Now that we’re entering the De-Lorian Era, it seems like the time has come to go back to the future. Follow the mentality that brought us Miguel Cabrera, José Fernández, Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna, and so on, but change the future outcomes so Libyan terrorists don’t kill Doc Brown we don’t have any more soul-shattering fire sales.

The Marlins organization has obviously brought in some fascinating talent via this last “re-tooling.” However, now that real baseball has started, we’re starting to see the parity within both the farm system and the Big Fish. If you got the opportunity to break down and redraft the entire current Marlins organization in the style of the NFL Draft what would your Big Board look like? Who goes first overall? Who becomes Mr. Irrelevant? If reorganizing the whole organization is too Herculean a task, just throw together a first round hypothetical pick and drop it in our FanPost section!

Here’s are some helpful link to the active and 40-man rosters and also the Top 30 prospects.