​I find myself thinking a lot about the 2023 Texas Rangers. Yes, I know this daily question post is supposed to be about the Marlins, and yes, I’ll spare you the long detour about that constraint. But the Rangers keep tugging at my curiosity, not because they won the World Series—did they? I’m not certain—but because of a curious set of numbers that carved out a strange narrative in that season.
Before the 2023 season, the Rangers were projected to win around 82 games, placing them fourth in their division. As the year unfolded, their talent level swung a bit, but not dramatically: they ended up roughly two wins better than projected, tipping into an 84-win talent level at their peak. Yet their actual results told a different story. They finished second in MLB in position-player fWAR and 20th in pitching fWAR, accumulating roughly 97 WAR in wins, a significant surplus relative to expectations. They out-hit their xwOBA by a modest margin and benefited from a slightly lower FIP compared with their xFIP, but nothing explosively out of line with the rest of the league. The Rangers ultimately settled at 90 wins.
That paradox—performing notably better than their talent level, while producing more on the field than their projection would suggest, yet not aligning with the underlying talent metrics—felt like a double-edged riddle. It’s the kind of misalignment that makes you question how much of a team’s fortune is luck, how much is performance leverage, and how often the stars align to create a season that defies simple explanation. It’s the kind of story that lodges itself in your head and doesn’t want to leave.
Now, shifting to the 2026 Miami Marlins, who at the moment are tied with the Philadelphia Phillies for the final two Wild Card spots in the National League, two games behind the Atlanta Braves. The Fish and the Phils are jockeying for position, holding the last two NL Wild Card slots while they’re two games ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals. Preseason projections for the Marlins had them pegged to win around 76 games, and their talent level has barely nudged upward over the course of the season, hovering near 77 wins. They sit sixth in position-player value and tenth in pitching value, with a current WAR-wins total of about 50, while actually amassing 51 wins to date.
The Marlins also carry the league’s second-biggest outperformance in xwOBA, behind only the Rockies, but they combine that with the league’s second-lowest HR/FB rate on the pitching side. That latter stat—likely aided by park factors—feels inconsistent with the xwOBA outperformance, suggesting they’re riding a complex mix of favorable outcomes that may or may not persist. The comparison to the Rangers isn’t exact, but it’s tempting: the Marlins have produced stellar numbers in some areas while lagging in others that typically drive wins, and they currently sit on pace for roughly 89 wins. If they can sustain it, we’re in for a wild ride. If not, regression could erase the cushion they’ve built.
All of this is a lot of data and a lot of “what-ifs,” but the core question remains provocative: are the Marlins good enough to keep this run going? They’ve delivered remarkable production to date, yet their team xwOBA sits in the middle of the pack (21st), while their team xFIP sits around the middle-to-lower range (15th). Those numbers suggest a squad that, on average, should be a high-70s to low-80s win team by projection, yet they’re on pace to approach the high-80s, maybe even flirting with 90 wins if the current stretch persists. That tension is precisely what makes their season so intriguing and why I keep thinking about the Rangers’ 2023 arc while watching the Marlins’ 2026 story unfold.
So, do I think the Marlins will pass the Phillies this season? Or surpass the Braves? I don’t simply want to tie it to the final standings, but rather to whether they can sustain this run, even if only temporarily, long enough to create a few more moments of disruption for the contenders. They’ve been in a stretch where they’ve lost only eight times over the last five-and-a-half weeks, a pace reminiscent of a spring that turned into a summer heater for the Braves in early 2026. If they can keep this momentum, the Marlins could push into or through those competitive thresholds. If the regression train arrives, the gap could close quickly.
In short, I’m watching the Marlins with the same sense of wary optimism I held for the 2023 Rangers: a team outperforming expectations in ways that are both exciting and uncertain, capable of challenging the status quo but also inherently fragile. Whether they can sustain this level, move past the Phillies or even the Braves in the short term, or drift back toward the central estimate remains to be seen. The season could tilt in a dozen different directions, and that ambiguity is what makes following the Marlins—and drawing parallels to that Rangers season—so captivating.