We’re now sitting here in the month of August and the Marlins have been leading the NL East since day 1 of the season. Prior to this year, the Marlins had never held a lead in the month of August and in fact have never won the division despite being a 2x World Series champ. You know they say third time’s a charm and as crazy as 2020 has become, it’s not unreasonable proclaim this as the year Miami finally gets a division crown to along with World Series banner #3.

Last week, we swept the Orioles in a four game series on the way to a 7-1 start. Some might say “well yeah that’s just the Orioles”, but Baltimore is actually 8-3 outside of that series. They had just swept the Rays beforehand and have not lost any of their games since. The Orioles are sucking a lot less this year, except against Miami that is.

Haters often malign the Marlins as a ‘lucky’ team for winning fluke titles, but you should call us anything but lucky this year. Not only did that covid outbreak leave all our players in solitary confinement for over a week, but our two most important players (ace pitchers José Ureña and Sandy Alcántara) are still inactive because of it.

Without those pocket aces in hand, Don Mattingly has masterfully managed a pitch-by-committee system to hold things down. He’s used five or more pitchers in 6 out of 8 games since covid restart. He used four pitchers in those other two games. The most valiant effort came from prospect Humberto Mejia, who had never pitched above Class A before starting Friday night at the Mets. He struck out a cool six over 2.1 innings.

Humberto Mejía became the first Marlins pitching prospect to skip Double-A and Triple-A and start a major league game since José Fernández in 2013.

The Mets lost to a starting pitcher that never made a start above single A. pic.twitter.com/pmp1lOtSoS

— HAKEEM3434 (@HAKEEM3434) August 8, 2020

Sick stuff.

Unfortunately we’re on a slight losing streak now. We got Degrom’d on Sunday, which is fine. Last night, we got unlucky as hell after a go ahead homer in the 10th got called back for being inches too foul. Again luck is not on our side this year… But we’re still in first place and things are going to turn. We’ll start getting those breaks and we’ll get our two aces back, and then we’ll be in first by way more.