With Miami Marlins ‘restructuring’ baseball operations, first round of departures underway

When the Miami Marlins announced on Sunday that Don Mattingly would not be returning as the team’s manager, general manager Kim Ng said to expect more departures throughout the organization’s baseball operations team.

The first round of moves have happened.

Sources confirmed to the Miami Herald on Friday that the Marlins have let go of director of player development Geoff DeGroot, professional scouting director Hadi Raad and five members of their pro scouting department.

Without directly naming names, Ng confirmed on Friday that the Marlins’ baseball operations department will be “doing some restructuring” and “obviously there are some folks that are not going to be with us next year.”

“These decisions are always difficult,” Ng said, “whether people have been here for a year or they’ve been here for 20 years. They’re always difficult. You’re talking about people’s lives, but we also have things that we need to accomplish and make sure that we have the people in place to move in the right direction.”

Ng said making these moves now allow staff members not returning to the organization to get a head start on finding another job.

“There are only a certain number of jobs out there,” Ng said. “We wanted guys to be able to have as much of a chance as they could to try and secure jobs.”

DeGroot was with the Marlins organization for five years, all in the player development and scouting department. This was his first season as the Marlins’ director of player development, where he oversaw and directed the development of all of the Marlins’ minor-league players.

Raad has been the Marlins’ director of professional scouting for the past three seasons after previously spending seven seasons in the New York Yankees’ organization.

And Ng reiterated this is just the start.

“We have more changes that we’ve talked about,” Ng said. “This is going to be an ongoing process, just to make sure that we get everybody going in the right direction.”

Which makes for a busy offseason, one in which the Marlins will be searching for a new manager in addition to the restructured baseball operations system on top of all the normal offseason processes.

“We have good people in place,” Ng said, “and I’m going to rely on them heavily to help me through all of this, but it’s going to take some time.”