Breaking down the Marlins’ offense and the simple message their hitting coach preaches

Most days when Miami Marlins players take the field for pregame work, the players are wearing custom t-shirts that were created by the team throughout the season.

There’s the Jorge Soler “Bad Bad Boy” shirt, which has the outfielder/designated hitter celebrating a home run in front of a fiery background (akin to the cover of the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence movie “Bad Boys”) and was inspired by a home run call from Marlins radio play-by-play man Kyle Sielaff.

When they were pushing for Luis Arraez to be named an All-Star starter, the Marlins wore shirts with Arraez’s silhouette that read “Arraez up and vote.”

And whenever Sandy Alcantara starts a home game, most players typically wear one of the shirts that have been given out in the “Sandy’s Beach” section at loanDepot park.

But there is one shirt in particular that has hitting coach Brant Brown smiling. It’s simplistic in its nature, a strike zone with different colored circles representing different pitches all inside the box.

The message: “Coach says color inside the lines.”

“We started monitoring their swings inside the box,” Brown explained. “We know what the major league average is for in-zone swings and out-of-zone swings. We started measuring every swing they took in a game with runners in scoring position and with two strikes and we started posting them up after the game. We started to keep score of it. We started making it competitive to try to teach them that 80 percent of hits come from inside the zone and 20 percent comes from outside the zone. ... So I just came up with color inside the lines, and they went with it.”

Brown, in his first year with the Marlins after spending the last four seasons as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ hitting strategist, has a penchant for simplifying complex topics. He uses visual aids and heat maps to boil down advanced analytical data to its simplest parts.

It’s a key part of his job, along with assistant hitting coaches John Mabry and Jason Hart, to put the team’s hitters in the best spot for success. The offense’s production is magnified even more now as the team makes its final push for a playoff spot.

“We [the coaches] use the information but then we dumb it down into pictures and words,” Brown said in an interview with the Miami Herald this weekend after the Marlins’ four-game sweep of the Washington Nationals. “You take the machine and then you put it in and then you come out and say it like a human. in ways that players of today can basically digest. You use videos. You use simplistic pictures. You talk through stuff. It’s just transforming the information.”

Players bought in early to his philosophy, Brown said, and the offense has had an uptick in production this season. Here’s a breakdown of how the Marlins’ offense has fared this season, entering Tuesday’s series opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers, compared to its results from the 2022 season.

▪ Batting average: .260, up from .230

▪ Runs per game: 4.08, up from 3.62

▪ Strikeout rate: 21.1 percent, down from 24 percent

▪ Batting average on pitches in the strike zone zone: .296 (sixth best in MLB), up from .265 (sixth-worst in MLB in 2022)

▪ Overall swing-and-miss rate: 24.2 percent, down from 26.9 percent.

▪ Games with at least six runs scored: 35 (with 25 games left to play), compared to 31 last season

▪ Games with one or zero runs scored: 24 (with 25 games left to play), compared to 38 last season.

But despite the improvements, the Marlins still have plenty of room to improve. The Marlins have hit into the most double plays of any team in baseball (135, 17 more than the second-place Atlanta Braves) and are among the bottom third of the league with runners in scoring position (.245 average, .691 OPS). Since the All-Star Break, their situational hitting has gone into a tailspin, with the team hitting just .199 with runners in scoring position in the second half of the season.

Brown mentioned two specific areas where he still sees the team needing to make significant strides.

First, it’s OK to have productive outs. Success isn’t always defined by a base hit if the hit doesn’t drive in a run.

“Understand what the game is calling for,” Brown said. “It’s OK with the infield back, a runner on third and less than two outs to just ground out.”

Second, it’s OK to draw walks. The Marlins are walking at just a 6.9-percent clip this season, down from 7.3 percent last season.

“We have to learn how to like walks,” Brown said. “We just don’t like to walk. We put the ball in play and we don’t strike out as much. Last year, it was high-strikeout and no walk. We’ve hit into more double plays because of the contact rate, but if we don’t get hits, we don’t win because we don’t walk. The minute we can start looking over a baseball and understanding that all pitches aren’t created equal and pitchers don’t always throw a strike with a 3-2 count, we can get on base via the walk.”

The Marlins saw glimpses of what went right for them in the first half in their four games against the Nationals. They scored 31 runs and logged 50 hits — including 14 extra-base hits — over the course of the series.

“Hitting and winning are contagious,” Brown said. “I think the biggest thing we talked about is don’t worry about the future and the playoffs. We play better when we execute. We’re energetic. We’re loud. We’re a little bit crazy. That was one of the messages. Just be loose, be loud and do your job.”