September 27, 2026
September 27, 2026
Miami Marlins’ 2025 Season: A Rebuild Starts to Look Real
The Miami Marlins’ 2025 season did not end in October baseball. It ended with something the franchise had not had in years: proof. A 79-83 finish and a third-place spot in the National League East will not headline anyone’s highlight reel. But the 22-game swing from 2024’s 62-100 disaster told a different story. Under first-year manager Clayton McCullough, a roster built on patience and player development clawed its way back toward relevance. By September, Miami looked less like a team stuck in a teardown and more like one building toward something real.
Clayton McCullough did not inherit a contender. He inherited wreckage, and he was hired anyway, tapped from the Los Angeles Dodgers’ coaching staff on November 11, 2024, to become the 17th manager in franchise history. Peter Bendix, running baseball operations for owner Bruce Sherman, had already committed to a slow, developmental rebuild the year before. McCullough’s job was never to win now. It was to make losing mean something. The roster he took over leaned young and unproven at nearly every position. Preseason expectations around the league sat at their lowest point in years. Nobody outside the clubhouse projected a playoff push. What they got instead was a club that refused to collapse the way the 2024 group had, opening the year with a 3-1 win over Pittsburgh and never again resembling the worst team in baseball. That distinction mattered more than it sounds. A single bad week can define a fragile roster. This one shook off several and kept playing.
Kyle Stowers turned a throwaway offseason acquisition into the best story of the season. He hit .280 with 16 home runs and 46 RBI through the first half alone. Those numbers led every qualified National League outfielder in batting average on balls in play. Voters rewarded him with a spot on the National League All-Star team on July 6, making him the first Marlins outfielder selected since 2017. He represented Miami alongside McCullough at the 95th All-Star Game in Atlanta on July 15. By year’s end he had climbed to a .288 average, 25 home runs, and a .544 slugging mark. He led the club in nearly every meaningful offensive category. This was not a hot streak that cooled once pitchers adjusted. It was a player seizing a role at exactly the moment his team needed one claimed, and he never let go of it.
Xavier Edwards gave the lineup its pulse. He batted .283 with 159 hits and 27 stolen bases, playing the kind of relentless, contact-first game that made every Marlins rally feel earned rather than accidental. Otto Lopez backed him up with 134 hits, 15 home runs, and 77 RBI. Rookie Jakob Marsee hit .292 in his first extended look at big-league pitching, a debut that came earlier than the organization originally planned. None of these names carried much weight back in 2023, when Miami’s lineup still leaned on veterans imported to patch holes rather than players it had actually grown. In the Miami Marlins’ 2025 season, they became the clearest argument that the rebuild had real players attached to it, not just prospect rankings and hopeful projections.
Every rival executive expected Sandy Alcantara to be gone before August 1. He was the reigning National League Cy Young winner, returning from Tommy John surgery, and a name that should have brought back a farm system’s worth of prospects. Miami said no. Bendix kept Alcantara. He kept fellow starter Edward Cabrera. He kept the rotation intact and bet that a staff allowed to develop together mattered more than whatever return package the phones could produce. Alcantara struggled to a 5.36 ERA across 31 starts in his first year back, proof the bet carried real risk. Cabrera answered with a sharper 3.53 ERA over 26 outings. The group held together rather than scattering across contenders’ bullpens for parts.
Miami did not sit entirely still. Outfielder Jesus Sanchez was sent to the Houston Astros in a four-player deal. That trade opened an outfield spot and pulled Marsee straight to the majors within days. Catcher Nick Fortes was moved as well, clearing the position for Agustin Ramirez to catch every day and grow into the job instead of competing for it in fragments. Both trades were surgical, not desperate. Miami sold role players to create innings and at-bats for the next wave. It protected the two arms it viewed as the rotation’s long-term core, a distinction that separated this deadline from prior fire sales in Miami.
The season never moved in a straight line. March and April were rough, a 12-18 stretch that briefly recalled the previous year’s collapse. May offered little relief at 11-15, and patience around the roster started to thin. Then June arrived, and Miami found its footing at 14-12. That stretch carried real weight because it proved the team could win series against competent opposition, not just avoid embarrassment. July pushed further, a 15-10 month that had McCullough’s group flirting, however briefly, with wild-card noise. August pulled the season back down with a 13-17 skid, the kind of stretch that separates true contenders from teams still finding themselves. Miami closed it out at 14-11 in September, finishing strong even after the math had already turned against them. That detail said as much about the roster’s character as any single win did.
Elimination arrived on September 25, a 0-1 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies that shut the door on any lingering postseason math. There was no denying it by then. The only question left was how Miami would spend its final week. The answer came on September 28, the last day of the regular season, when the Marlins beat the New York Mets 4-0 and knocked New York out of the postseason picture in the same swing. It was the third time in franchise history Miami had eliminated the Mets on the final day of a season. That result landed as a reminder that this roster, even out of contention itself, still had teeth. Miami did not fade quietly into the offseason. It closed the door on someone else’s season instead, and there was a certain justice in that.
A .488 winning percentage will not draw headlines on its own, but context changes everything here. The Miami Marlins’ 2025 season represented a 22-win improvement over the previous year. It was built on a rookie manager, a returning ace still finding his command, and a group of position players who arrived with almost no expectations attached. Stowers is now a legitimate All-Star, a fact confirmed in MLB’s own announcement of his selection. Edwards is an everyday table-setter. Marsee and Ramirez are already contributing before their careers have properly started. Miami still has real work ahead in its rotation depth and its bullpen. Nobody in that clubhouse would mistake 79 wins for a finished product. But the arrow, for the first time in years, points up, a trajectory the club’s full-season numbers at Baseball-Reference back up in detail. The Marlins enter their offseason with a foundation instead of a question mark. For a franchise that spent 2024 searching for any sign of direction, that alone made the Miami Marlins’ 2025 season worth watching from wire to wire.
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