The sun rises hard over the Marlins’ academy in the Dominican Republic, turning the red clay fields into mirrors of heat. There are no games scheduled, no crowds gathering. On these days, not even the crack of a bat cuts through the morning air.
Instead, the soundtrack is iron plates clanging in a revamped weight room and the quickened breath of teenagers sprinting across damp grass.
It’s the byproduct of a new start for the Marlins, one that defies their past organizational rhythm of bullpens, batting practice and intrasquads. They’ve largely stripped those days to the essentials of motion and muscle, wagering that the foundation of player development is not more swings or throws but, rather, bodies that are stronger, faster and more resilient than the ones that arrived.
It is a calculated bet, and it reveals how much in Miami has changed.
For years, the Marlins have lagged behind rivals with deeper resources and shinier facilities. The consequences piled up. Since winning the 2003 World Series, the franchise has managed just six winning records and two postseason appearances in 22 seasons.
And while 2025 will still likely end in a sub-.500 record on the major league side, this year offered something different—a resounding success for an organization intent on correcting its course and rebuilding its reputation as a place where talent can truly grow.
Under new leadership, the Marlins have begun to define themselves through an ethos of physicality, alignment and the belief that a unified system and emphasis on strength can close the gap.
“We didn’t play any games,” Rachel Balkovec, the club’s director of player development, said of a Marlins offseason strength and conditioning camp. “They just trained. And guys saw incredible, incredible physical gains.”
That camp was not an isolated experiment but one of the clearest signals of what Miami is trying to become.
The Marlins are betting that strength is culture, that a body reshaped can unlock a career and that clarity across the system matters more than gadgets or excess games. For an organization that has often trailed its peers in resources, it is a wager rooted in both humility and audacity.
The reset began with people. In the past two years, the club has undergone sweeping personnel changes, from the hiring of president Peter Bendix in November 2023 and adding Balkovec two months later to bringing in new directors across pitching, hitting and performance. The result was the authority to stitch together a single, unified philosophy across the entire franchise.
“Getting the right people on the bus is something that was really important to us,” Balkovec said. “Not that we’re perfect, but the alignment that we have, top to bottom, Dominican Republic to the big leagues, is probably one of the best in the industry.”
Hector Crespo, the Marlins’ director of minor league operations, has watched that shift settle into daily rhythms. To him, the progress can be measured, not in slogans, but in the way players now understand precisely where they stand.
“Every single player in our organization should know exactly how we value them and how they’re being evaluated,” Crespo said. “And ultimately, if they don’t, then it’s a reflection on us in a negative light.”
That sense of transparency has become baked into the foundation of Miami’s player development language. On the hitting side, the message is reduced to three essentials: swing decisions, contact rate and quality of contact. A teenager taking his first swings in the Dominican Summer League is fed the same priorities as a veteran holding down a locker in the major league clubhouse.
“It makes conversations smoother,” Balkovec said. “Everyone is speaking the same language.”
The results have begun to sharpen into numbers that even outsiders can’t ignore. On the mound, lefthander Robby Snelling has embodied the shift.
A year ago, Snelling slogged through a 5.15 ERA, piling up 45 walks in 115 innings. Fast forward to this summer, and the 2023 BA Minor League Pitcher of the Year looked transformed. Leaner, more precise and more durable, he sliced his ERA to 2.61 with 159 strikeouts in 131 innings. His fastball is carrying two extra ticks, and his arsenal has been reshaped with smarter usage.
Fellow lefty Thomas White made a similar leap. Already a prized arm, he embraced the demand for refinement. His strikeout total climbed from 120 to 138, his ERA dipping to 2.33 from 2.81 in nearly the same number of innings—proof of sharper efficiency even as hitters advanced against him.
Crespo pointed to White and Snelling as “poster children” of the Marlins’ new model as highly-touted prospects who were willing to accept blunt feedback and translate it into measurable progress.
“Just sitting with them at the beginning of the season and letting them know, ‘Hey, these are your objectives, this is your action plan, this is what we want you to get to,’” Crespo said. “Then seeing them take that and have the year that they had was pretty remarkable.”
Righthander Karson Milbrandt offered another case study.
In 2024, he walked more than a batter every other inning and finished with a 4.33 ERA. Determined to reset, he added 20 pounds of strength, rebuilt his delivery and rediscovered his conviction on the mound.
The result? A 3.00 ERA with 113 strikeouts against 48 walks and a promotion to Double-A, where he allowed just two runs across his first 10.2 innings.
“He was more confident,” Balkovec said of Milbrandt. “He was just a different person.”
The changes were not limited to the pitching staff. Outfielder Kemp Alderman, long considered a tantalizing power bat, emerged as one of the clearest beneficiaries of Miami’s simplified hitting language. After managing just eight home runs with a .242 average in 2024, he erupted for 21 homers, 21 stolen bases and a .283/.335/.473 slash line in 2025.
It was not only a surge in production but validation of the three pillars drilled into hitters: swing decisions, contact rate and quality of contact.
The most striking transformation may have come from the Dominican Summer League, where Luis Cova grew into the embodiment of Miami’s new philosophy. Last season, he hit .239 with modest power. A year later, his OPS climbed by nearly 200 points as he produced a .299 average, nine home runs, 11 doubles and 35 stolen bases in 50 games.
Crespo credited the environment as much as the player.
“There was no letup,” he said. “Our coaches created environments that continuously challenged (Cova) every single day. And then it was cool to see him accept that challenge.”
Each of these steps has carried significance beyond the box score. They’ve represented the cultural buy-in Miami had long lacked and the result has been a farm system finally producing impact seasons instead of isolated outliers.
For an organization with just six winning records since 2003, the accumulation mattered. It was the first sustained evidence that the Marlins’ deliberate wagers on physicality and alignment were changing more than rhetoric.
They were changing careers.
“It’s all about alignment,” Crespo said. “If the people who are signing players and the people who are developing players aren’t saying the same thing, you’re going to lose them. That connection is what allows us to move guys faster, because they know from day one exactly what we expect.”
That integration has been most visible on the international side, where the Marlins’ Dominican Academy now serves as both a proving ground and a point of pride for the franchise. Once a facility known more for promise than results, it has been reimagined as the heartbeat of Miami’s developmental system.
The campus hums with strength work, skill instruction and cultural education—a place where players as young as 16 begin to hear the same language they will one day encounter in Jupiter or Miami.
For Balkovec, the academy is one of the clearest symbols of the organizational reset.
“It’s probably my proudest thing in this whole job so far,” she said. “And to be clear, that was a team effort. We’ve done a lot of work to improve how we operate internationally, specifically in the Dominican Republic.”
Six of Miami’s top 20 prospects spent at least part of the 2025 season in the Dominican Republic, including Cova and righty Kevin Defrank, a hulking flamethrower with Top 100 potential.
“We want to be the most physical team in the Dominican,” Balkovec said. “When other teams play us, they should feel it.”
Crespo highlighted one unique trait that Miami can offer over rival teams.
“We have a great opportunity because of how close the Dominican Republic is to Miami,” he said. “We want to be the organization that international players want to come to. We want them to see that if they sign with the Marlins, they’re going to be developed the right way, they’re going to get stronger, they’re going to get better.”
For all of the promise it offers, the Marlins’ vision is still fragile.
Player development is ultimately only as meaningful as the big league wins it eventually produces. But inside the organization, there is a sense that something has shifted in the foundation. The Marlins are no longer improvising—they are building.
Humility, Balkovec likes to say, is the secret to sustaining progress. It is what prevents success from calcifying into complacency and what allows the system to keep evolving rather than congratulating itself too soon. Crespo echoed that sentiment in simple terms: Coaches must be teachers, and teachers must keep learning.
For the first time in decades, Miami believes it has a structure capable of turning talent into results. The days of drifting behind the sport’s leaders may not be entirely over, but the gap is closing.
And now, the Marlins are laying the groundwork for a future that looks different than their past.
“At the end of the day, our job is to prepare players for Miami,” Crespo said. “If we keep building the right habits and the right culture, the wins will come. It’s not about shortcuts. It’s about doing it the right way.”
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