The Marlins are keeping Clayton McCullough. Word came down from the front office that the president of baseball operations, Peter Bendix, has committed to McCullough for the 2027 season, and the reason given is the cleanest one there is: Miami just posted its most wins over a two-season span since 2009 and 2010.
Sit with that sentence for a second. Two seasons. Sixteen years. That is not a compliment to McCullough so much as an indictment of everything that happened in between.
Why the Marlins committed to Clayton McCullough for 2027
McCullough came over from the Dodgers organization, where he spent years in player development before landing on the big league staff, and he inherited exactly the kind of job that eats managers. Young roster. Thin margins. A payroll that has spent most of this century as a punchline. The brief was never "win the division." The brief was "make these kids into major leaguers and don't lose the room."
He did the first part well enough that the front office is now saying it out loud, in September, without a search committee attached. In Miami, that is the actual news. This is a franchise that has run through managers like rental cars: two World Series trophies in 1997 and 2003, followed by two of the most thorough teardowns any organization has ever inflicted on its own fan base. Don Mattingly's run from 2016 through 2022 stands as the longest anyone has lasted in the dugout here, and even that ended with the team nowhere near contention. Skip Schumaker won National League Manager of the Year in 2023, took the Marlins to the playoffs, and was gone after the following season.
So when Miami tells you a manager is coming back for a third year on merit rather than on inertia, that is a tell about how the organization sees its own timeline.
What McCullough's two seasons actually bought Miami
The honest framing: nobody is hanging a banner. Miami is not part of wild-card week. The field this year belongs to the Red Sox and Yankees, the White Sox and Astros, the Cubs and Padres, the Phillies and Braves, with the Dodgers and Brewers sitting on byes. Miami is home, watching, same as most of the league.
But the standard for a rebuilding club was never October. It was the trend line. Two years of the best cumulative wins since the Hanley Ramirez era is the trend line clearing the bar, and it happened during a stretch where pitching has never been harder to hit. League-wide fastball velocity just set a record for the sixth straight season at 94.8 mph, and batting averages are still scraping along near all-time lows. Developing young hitters into that environment is the hardest job in the sport right now. Anybody telling you otherwise hasn't watched a 22-year-old try to catch up to 99 with a slider behind it.
from the almanac: this is the same franchise that once handed the dugout to 72-year-old Jack McKeon in May of 2003 and watched him win a World Series that October. baseball does not care about your five-year plan.
What comes next for McCullough and Peter Bendix
Continuity is the point, and continuity is also the pressure. Once you tell your manager he is safe, the next conversation is about the roster he's been handed. Bendix arrived from Tampa Bay with a reputation for finding value in places other clubs won't look, and a manager under contract for a third season is a signal that the front office believes the development curve is real rather than a fluke of a soft schedule.
The thing I'll be watching through the winter is whether the commitment to the manager is matched by a commitment to the payroll. A third year is cheap. Adding a veteran arm or a real middle-of-the-order bat is not. If McCullough gets the same roster with the same margins and is asked to squeeze another step out of it, the vote of confidence starts to look more like a vote of convenience.
But he earned the chair. In Miami, that's a rare thing to be able to say.