The Marlins have outrighted infielders Eddy Alvarez and Deven Marrero and right-handers Preston Guilmet and Andrew Bellatti off their 40-man roster, tweets Jordan McPherson of the Miami Herald. The Fish now have 36 players on the 40-man roster, but with seven players on the 60-day injured list, they’ll still need to clear three more spots to reinstate all of their injured players between now and the conclusion of the postseason. All four players will be eligible for minor league free agency.
Of the two infielders, Alvarez saw significantly more action in 2021, compiling a .188/.297/.328 line across 74 plate appearances. He also made a few headlines in both 2020 and 2021: first when he became the first Winter Olympic medalist to appear in a Major League Game (he won a silver medal in speed skating at the 2014 Sochi Games), then again when he became the third American to medal in both the Summer and Winter Olympics (he was a member of the silver-winning USA baseball squad in this summer’s Tokyo Games).
Marrero, a first-round pick of the Red Sox in 2012, put together a similar .188/.316/.375 line across just 19 PAs. He’s seen big-league action in six seasons (three with Boston, one with Arizona, and two with Miami) but has never managed to put together an extended run of production. Across a career-high 188 PAs for the BoSox in 2017, he managed only a meager .211/.259/.333 triple-slash. He hasn’t managed much more in the minors (he has a .623 OPS across 490 games in Triple-A) but remains a plus defender and could get a chance to catch on elsewhere.
Like Marrero, neither Guilmet nor Bellatti saw much time on the field for the Marlins. Guilmet covered only two innings (4.50 ERA) in two appearances, while Bellatti was roughed up (13.50 ERA) in a tiny sample of 3 1/3 IP in three trips to the mound. Guilmet’s track record is much longer, appearing with seven clubs across five big-league seasons, but he’s never seen more innings than the 10 1/3 he covered for Baltimore in 2014.
Bellatti’s brief run in 2021 was his first in the bigs since he posted a strong 2.31 ERA (albeit with a 5.23 FIP) across 23 1/3 innings for the Rays in 2015 before injuries derailed his career. He was out of baseball entirely in 2017 and ’18 before latching on with the Yankees Double-A affiliate in 2019 (after a single outing with the Atlantic League’s Sugar Land Skeeters) and ultimately getting the call from the Marlins this year.