Miami Marlins Snap a 12-Game Skid and Sweep the Phillies in a Whiplash Week

If you only checked in on the Miami Marlins twice this week, you saw two different teams. Monday afternoon they were carrying a 12-game losing streak, the longest active skid in baseball, having just been swept at home by the red-hot Padres. By Wednesday night they had swept the slumping Phillies out of loanDepot park — capped by an eight-run comeback that was their biggest rally of the season — and clawed their way back to .500. Thursday's 4-2 loss at Citi Field trimmed the feel-good factor and left Miami at 55-55, but after the two weeks this club just lived through, a week of Miami Marlins news that ends with a sweep of a division rival counts as a win.

How the Losing Streak Reached 12

Some context, because the collapse was as steep as the June climb that preceded it. The Marlins won 20 games in June, surged to 52-42 by July 9, and were being openly discussed as trade-deadline buyers with the seventh-best run differential in baseball. Then the wins simply stopped. The skid started against Cleveland before the All-Star break — the last victory in the streak-adjacent stretch came against Seattle on the homestand before the break — and rolled through series losses to the Brewers and beyond until the Padres arrived last weekend riding their own surge.

San Diego made it three more. The Padres took the opener 4-2 on Friday, loss number ten. Saturday was a 7-2 defeat in which Eury Perez actually gave Miami a real chance — seven innings, three earned runs — before the bullpen and a Ty France-led Padres attack blew it open late, with JP Sears picking up the win. Sunday's 5-3 loss completed the sweep and ran the streak to twelve. At that point the Marlins had gone from three games back in the NL East to nine and a half, and national writers were openly wondering whether Sandy Alcantara would be wearing a different uniform by August.

Three Nights That Turned the Miami Marlins' Week Around

It's worth pausing on how strange that Padres series was on paper. Miami had been one of baseball's better home stories early in the year, and Perez's Saturday start was the kind of outing that wins most nights — instead it became the eleventh loss, with the official announcement noting the last Marlins victory had come against Seattle before the break. Sunday's finale sent Walker Buehler against Janson Junk, and the 5-3 result meant Miami had dropped six straight at loanDepot park.

Then the Phillies came to town, dragging a slump of their own — Philadelphia has lost four straight series since the All-Star Game — and Miami finally punched back. Monday's 8-7 win was the emotional release valve: down early after Bryce Harper's 419-foot two-run homer in the first, the Marlins hung around, got a two-run single from Heriberto Hernandez in the ninth off Jhoan Duran, and won it on Griffin Conine's walk-off single. The streak died at twelve, and it died with a storybook flourish — Conine became just the fifth player since 2000 to deliver a walk-off hit for a franchise where his father had done the same. Jeff Conine is Mr. Marlin; his kid now has his own loanDepot park moment.

Tuesday was the polar opposite, a taut 1-0 win decided entirely by Kyle Stowers' home run, the second straight victory. And Wednesday was the flex: down 6-0 to the Phillies, Miami mounted its largest comeback of the season and won 8-6. Conine did damage again, this time with a go-ahead pinch-hit homer in the eighth. Hernandez homered and drove in two, Otto Lopez and Xavier Edwards chipped in two RBIs apiece, Tyler Zuber got the win in relief, and Pete Fairbanks slammed the door for his fifteenth save. A sweep of Philadelphia, from twelve straight losses to three straight wins, in about 72 hours.

Standout Performances

• Griffin Conine — a walk-off single Monday and a go-ahead pinch-hit homer Wednesday. The week's clear headliner.
• Heriberto Hernandez — homered off Zack Wheeler on Monday, added the game-tying two-run single in the ninth, then homered again Wednesday. Five RBIs across the sweep.
• Kyle Stowers — supplied the only run of Tuesday's 1-0 win.
• Otto Lopez — still hitting a team-best .332, quietly one of the better shortstop stories in the league.
• Eury Perez — took the loss Saturday but gave the team seven innings of three-run ball during the worst week to be a Marlins starter. He's 5-8, a record that says far more about run support than about him.
• Pete Fairbanks and Calvin Faucher — the late-inning duo did its job in the sweep, Faucher earning Monday's win and Fairbanks converting save number fifteen on Wednesday.
• Max Meyer — hasn't been the story this month, but his 9-1 mark remains one of the quietly excellent pitching lines in the National League this season.

Miami Marlins News From the Deadline Front

The trade deadline is Monday, August 3, at 6 p.m. ET, and the skid scrambled Miami's plans. In early July, with the team ten games over .500, reports had the Marlins likely to buy — adding at third base, in the back of the rotation, and in the bullpen — while keeping Alcantara, whose $21 million option for 2027 complicates any midseason deal. The 12-game slide reopened the seller conversation: Cubs-focused outlets floated Alcantara (4.01 ERA over 22 starts) as a renewed target, arguing the skid might lower Miami's asking price. The counterweight is that even at 55-55, the Marlins sit only about three games out of the final NL wild card spot, and their farm system has been thinned by injuries to top pitching prospects Robby Snelling and Thomas White — which cuts against a full teardown. The likeliest outcome is a middle path: listen on veterans, keep the core, and let the next few days decide how bold anyone gets.

Standings and the Road Ahead

The sweep restored some dignity but not much ground. Miami is 55-55, fourth in the NL East, roughly nine and a half games behind Atlanta and looking up at a Phillies club that keeps losing yet remains ahead of them, with Washington sitting right alongside the Marlins in the middle of the division. The division race is effectively out of reach; the wild card is the realistic conversation, and about three games is a coverable margin in August — if the June version of this team shows up more often than the mid-July version. Thursday in Queens was a reminder of how thin the margins are: Miami carried a 2-2 tie into the late innings before a two-run single in the eighth sent the Mets to a 4-2 win in the series opener.

What's next:

• Friday–Sunday: the series at Citi Field continues, three more against a Mets team playing better at home than its record suggests.
• Next week: home dates with the Braves (August 4-6), then the Angels visit (August 7-9).
• Monday: the trade deadline, which will tell us how the front office really read the last three weeks.

The whiplash makes this a hard team to project, which is exactly what makes Miami Marlins baseball worth watching right now. The 20-win June was real; so was the 12-game skid; so was the sweep of Philadelphia. Somewhere in that spread is the actual team, and with a soft-ish August schedule and a wild card berth within arm's reach, the Marlins have a couple of weeks to prove the streak was the fluke — and not the June that came before it.