The Miami Marlins clearly had some locker room issues in the past that they had to get over before returning to the playoffs in 2023.
In a recent interview with The Pivot Podcast, one of their star players spent a lot of time talking about the toxic culture the locker room used to have.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. took his hosts through a couple of examples of how their team’s leaders used to a do a poor job of leading.
“I was already a team leader without being called a team leader,” said Chisholm. “But you can’t be a team leader when you’ve got guys in the clubhouse that’s been in there for nine, 10 years, even though they suck. They’ve been there for nine, 10 years and the team calls them the team captain. But like, they’re not a good captain. They’re not a good person. You’re not even a good athlete at this point. You’re just here and you’re bringing down the young guys that are supposed to be good.”
Chisholm told a story about how the vets on the team berated a young player for doing the “Juan Soto shuffle” at the plate after drawing a walk following a home run in his first at-bat.
Chisholm would then go on to give more examples of players being bad leaders, being sure to use quotation marks around the term “team captain” when talking about a specific former player, commonly considered to be former shortstop Miguel Rojas, who was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers last season.
“They would let me sleep through a whole game [if they could], it’s [almost] happened,” Chisholm added. “Our ‘team captain’ when I was younger came in, saw me sleeping before the game, like an hour before the game, and like he knew we had a team meeting. Let me stay there and sleep through the team meeting. The coach came and woke me up 15 minutes before the game. The team captain!”
To end things on a good note, Chisholm also added how the locker room right now is a contrast to how it used to be. Culture seems to be a lot better and the team leaders seem to be more accountable.
