The History of the Miami Marlins: Every Era, from the First Season to Today
The Marlins story in eras, from the 1993 expansion team to two wild-card World Series titles in 1997 and 2003, the fire sales, the move to Miami, and the Stanton and Alcantara years through 2025.
The Marlins have played 33 seasons, won two World Series, and never won a division title. Both championships, in 1997 and 2003, came as a wild-card team, and in both cases the club beat a team with a far bigger payroll or a far longer history in October. In between, the franchise has produced some of the worst records in the National League, a home address that changed names more often than it changed location, and a pattern in which each title was followed by a rebuild so abrupt that the standings fell off a cliff.
The numbers are lopsided in a way that is almost unique. Through the 2025 season the club's all-time record in the historical record is 2,382 wins and 2,792 losses, a .460 winning percentage, but its postseason record is better than almost any club's: it won its first seven postseason series before finally losing one in 2020. This article follows the franchise through its eras, using the season-by-season data to separate what is documented from what is folklore.
The names and ballparks matter to the story, so a quick map comes first. The club was the Florida Marlins from 1993 to 2011 and the Miami Marlins from 2012 on. It played in a football stadium in Miami-Dade County, shared with the NFL's Dolphins and renamed several times, until 2011, then moved into a new retractable-roof park in Miami's Little Havana neighbourhood. The current home is covered in the loanDepot park guide, and the best individual careers are collected in the best players in Marlins history.
The names and the ballparks
| Years | Name | Ballpark in the database | Best attendance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1993-1998 | Florida Marlins | Joe Robbie Stadium | 3,064,847 |
| 1999-2004 | Florida Marlins | Pro Player Stadium | 1,723,105 |
| 2005-2010 | Florida Marlins | Dolphin Stadium | 1,852,608 |
| 2011 | Florida Marlins | Sun Life Stadium | 1,477,462 |
| 2012-2020 | Miami Marlins | Marlins Park | 2,219,444 |
| 2021-2025 | Miami Marlins | loanDepot park | 1,162,819 |
The first four rows are one building under four different names. The highest attendance in club history came in the very first season, 1993, and the club has not been near it since. The best year after that was the 1997 championship season at 2,364,387, followed by 2,219,444 in 2012, the first year at the new park.
The expansion years: 1993 to 1996
The franchise was awarded in 1991 and began play in 1993 as one of two National League expansion teams, along with the Colorado Rockies. The first Marlins team was 64-98 and finished sixth in the seven-team National League East, and more than three million people came to see it. Rene Lachemann was the first manager, with a record of 221-285 in 506 games from 1993 to 1996.
The early club did what expansion clubs do: it traded for veterans with some bat and some name value and waited. Gary Sheffield hit 122 home runs for the club from 1993 to 1998, and Jeff Conine, a hitter taken in the expansion draft, would play for the franchise from 1993 to 2005, collecting 1,005 hits, 120 home runs and 553 RBI. Records of 64-98, 51-64 (the strike-shortened 1994 season), 67-76 and 80-82 in 1996 show steady progress toward respectability. The 80-82 team of 1996 finished third and had the best record the club had had.
The first title: 1997
In 1997 the Marlins won 92 games and 70 losses, the best record in club history to this day, and finished second in the East behind Atlanta. That earned them the wild card. Jim Leyland, hired for 1997, led the team, and the club had spent heavily on free agents beforehand, a fact that matters for what came next.
The postseason run was extraordinary. The Marlins swept the Giants in the division series, three games to none, then beat the Braves, four games to two, in a National League Championship Series in which Atlanta's pitching staff was considered the strongest in baseball. In the World Series they faced Cleveland, and the series went the full seven games. Game 7 went into extra innings, and Edgar Renteria's single in the 11th inning won it. The Marlins had won the World Series in their fifth season, faster than any expansion club had done up to that point.
The next year, the roof fell in. After the title, the owner, Wayne Huizenga, cut the payroll sharply and the roster was largely dispersed. The 1998 Marlins were 54-108, the worst record in the club's history, and the defending champions finished fifth in their division, 54 games under .500 and the worst record in the franchise's history. Leyland left after the 1998 season with a record of 146-178 for the club.
The wilderness: 1999 to 2002
The four years after the dismantling were the franchise's low plateau. The 1999 team was 64-98; the next three were 79-82, 76-86 and 79-83. The stadium carried a sponsor's name (Pro Player Stadium in the database's listing for these years), and attendance sank, to 813,118 in 2002. The managers of the period included John Boles and Jeff Torborg, and neither had much of a roster to work with.
Yet the pieces of the next team were assembled in these years. Luis Castillo, a switch-hitting second baseman who joined in 1996, would become the franchise's career leader in hits (1,273), runs (675), stolen bases (281) and walks (533) by the time he left in 2005. A. J. Burnett and Josh Beckett came up as pitchers, and Mike Lowell and Derrek Lee were established in the infield. Lowell, who played for the club from 1999 to 2005, collected 143 home runs and 578 RBI, the second-highest RBI total in club history.
The second title: 2003
The 2003 team is the second half of the franchise's strange October record. The club started slowly, and in the middle of May Jeff Torborg was replaced by Jack McKeon, who was 72 years old, back in a dugout after years away. McKeon's record with the club was 281-257 in 538 games from 2003 to 2011.
The Marlins finished 91-71, second in the East, and again qualified as the wild card. They beat the Giants in the division series, three games to one. In the NLCS they met the Cubs, who led the series three games to one before the Marlins won the final three, the series famous for the sixth-game incident in the stands at Wrigley Field. The Marlins won four games to three. In the World Series they faced the Yankees, a team that had won the pennant with the largest payroll in baseball, and won in six games. Josh Beckett closed the series with a complete-game shutout in Game 6 at Yankee Stadium.
The 2003 roster is among the best young collections the sport has seen. Dontrelle Willis was the National League Rookie of the Year, going 14-6 with a 3.30 ERA; Miguel Cabrera, who debuted that June, would become the franchise's best hitter of the period, with 138 home runs and 523 RBI in five seasons (2003 to 2007); Juan Pierre, who stole 190 bases for the club from 2003 to 2013, set the table. But the pattern that followed 1997 held in a milder form. Lee was gone after 2003, and Beckett, Lowell and Castillo all played their last Marlins seasons in 2005.
Good players, no October: 2004 to 2011
The next stretch is the least discussed in the franchise's history, partly because it contains no playoff games and partly because it was never as bad as it should have been. The club won 83 games in both 2004 and 2005, finishing third each time, then fell to 78 and 71 wins in 2006 and 2007 as a young team was assembled almost from scratch. Then it improved: 84-77 in 2008, 87-75 in 2009, and 80-82 in 2010.
The 2009 record of 87-75, second in the East, is the third-best by winning percentage in the club's history, behind only the two title years. The stars were home-grown or acquired cheaply: Hanley Ramirez, the 2006 Rookie of the Year and the franchise's only career .300 hitter with 3,000 or more at-bats, produced 148 home runs and 230 stolen bases in 2006 to 2012; Dan Uggla hit 154 home runs from 2006 to 2010; Chris Coghlan won the 2009 Rookie of the Year Award. On the mound, Ricky Nolasco won 81 games from 2006 to 2013, the most in club history, and Josh Johnson won 56 and Anibal Sanchez 44.
The 2011 season, 72-90, was the last at the old stadium. It was also the end of the Florida name. The club, then playing in Sun Life Stadium, had been trying for years to secure public financing for a ballpark of its own.
The new park and a rebrand: 2012 to 2016
The new park opened in 2012, and with it came a new name and a new look, a retractable roof and a spending spree that brought a number of established free agents. It did not work out on the field. The 2012 team went 69-93, finishing fifth, and 2013 was 62-100. Attendance in the first year was 2,219,444, and it fell to 1,586,322 the next season.
The bright spots were the young pitchers. Jose Fernandez, who debuted in 2013, won the National League Rookie of the Year Award after going 12-6 with a 2.19 ERA and 187 strikeouts in 172.2 innings. He missed most of 2014 and 2015, and in 2016 he went 16-8 with 253 strikeouts, the best season of his short career. He died in a boating accident in September 2016, at the age of 24, and the historical record shows his death on September 25 in Miami Beach. His career line is 38-17 with a 2.58 ERA over 76 starts. Any account of the franchise that reads only the records misses how much that loss mattered to the club and to its city.
Giancarlo Stanton, who began his career in 2010 and became the club's home run leader with 267, was the other constant. The Mattingly era began in 2016, when his first team went 79-82. He finished with a record of 439-579 over seven seasons through 2022, the largest sample of any Marlins manager. (Mattingly's own career is profiled in our Don Mattingly article.)
The Jeter era: 2017 to 2022
A new ownership group took over before the 2018 season, led by Bruce Sherman, with former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter as its public face and chief executive. The change came after one of the best individual seasons in the club's history. Stanton hit 59 home runs in 2017 with 132 RBI and a .281 average and was named National League Most Valuable Player, the only MVP in the Marlins record. The team that year was 77-85 and finished second in the division.
Then came another rebuild. Stanton was traded to the Yankees after the season, and the database shows him in a Yankees uniform in 2018. The club was 63-98 in 2018, 57-105 in 2019, the second-worst record in franchise history, and then came the pandemic season. In 2020 the Marlins played 60 games, finished 31-29 and second in the East, and made the postseason as one of the expanded field. They swept the Cubs in the wild-card series, two games to none, and lost the division series to Atlanta, zero to three. Kim Ng was hired as general manager in November 2020, the first woman to hold that job for a major-league club.
The club's records over the next two seasons were 67-95 in 2021 and 69-93 in 2022. The bright spot was a pitcher, Sandy Alcantara, who went 14-9 with a 2.28 ERA in 228.2 innings in 2022 and won the National League Cy Young Award, the only one in franchise history. His club career totals through 2025 are 52 wins and 921 strikeouts, and his 3.64 ERA is the best of any Marlins pitcher with 1,000 innings.
2023 to 2025: another October, another reset
The 2023 team won 84 games and lost 78, finishing third and earning a wild-card spot, in the first season under Skip Schumaker, who was named the National League Manager of the Year. The series was short: the Phillies won the wild-card round, two games to none. It was the club's fourth postseason appearance and its second straight loss in a series.
The next year was the low point of the modern era. The Marlins were 62-100 in 2024 and finished last. Alcantara, who had needed surgery, is not listed in the 2024 season of the database. The 2025 team improved to 79-83 and third, with Alcantara back for 31 games and an 11-12 record, but with an ERA of 5.36 that is far from his 2022 level. That 2025 season was also the final year in the database used here, so check the club's own pages for anything that has happened since.
The numbers behind the eras
| Era | Years | Typical record | What defined it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expansion | 1993-1996 | 64-98 to 80-82 | Building from the expansion draft |
| First title | 1997-1998 | 92-70, then 54-108 | A title and an immediate sell-off |
| Wilderness | 1999-2002 | 64-98 to 79-83 | Rebuilding around young arms |
| Second title | 2003 | 91-71 | McKeon, Beckett, Cabrera, Willis |
| Near misses | 2004-2011 | 71-91 to 87-75 | Ramirez, Uggla, Nolasco, Johnson |
| New park | 2012-2016 | 62-100 to 79-82 | Stanton, Fernandez, Mattingly |
| Jeter ownership | 2017-2022 | 57-105 to 77-85 (31-29 in 2020) | Stanton's MVP, a 2020 playoff trip |
| Recent | 2023-2025 | 62-100 to 84-78 | Alcantara, Schumaker, another reset |
The club leaders tell the same story in compressed form. Stanton leads in home runs (267) and RBI (672); Castillo in hits (1,273), runs and steals; Nolasco in wins (81) and strikeouts (1,001); Robb Nen in saves (108). The database lists no Hall of Fame player with four or more seasons for the club, which says something about how often the roster was rebuilt.
Common questions
Have the Marlins ever won their division? No. Both World Series teams were wild cards, and the franchise has never finished first in the East. Its best finishes are second place, in 1997, 2003, 2009, 2017 and 2020.
How many World Series has the club played? Two, and it won both: in 1997 against Cleveland, four games to three, and in 2003 against the Yankees, four games to two.
Why were the sell-offs so severe? The usual explanation is revenue: an owner who said the club could not pay its roster without a new ballpark responded by cutting payroll. The database cannot show motives, only results, and those are clear: 54 wins in 1998 after a title, and 57 wins in 2019.
Which Marlins have won major awards? The records list Dontrelle Willis (2003), Hanley Ramirez (2006), Chris Coghlan (2009) and Jose Fernandez (2013) as Rookie of the Year winners, Stanton (2017) as MVP, and Alcantara (2022) as Cy Young winner.
Where to go next
To compare the Marlins with their division rivals, read the histories of the Atlanta Braves, the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies. The two October runs are covered in more detail in the best Marlins seasons and every October run, and the format that put a wild-card team into the World Series is explained in the history of the World Series. For the live record and the next game, see the Marlins team page and the loanDepot park page.