Are new Marlins owners facing fire sale?

Everyone sees by now the Miami Marlins are a truly bad baseball team. They entered Saturday night with the secondworst record in baseball at 14-27. That ties them at this mile marker with the 1998 Marlins, that firesale team who descended to the worst record in team history on full merit.

“Worst line-up I’ve ever written out,” said the ’98 team’s manager, Jim Leyland, one day while holding up the line-up card.

That lineup isn’t this lineup. That’s part of the frustration of this year. But while the ’98 season was the first, ugly step toward something better the true awfulness of this season won’t be clear until the dust settles and the new owners start cleaning up this mess.

It doesn’t matter who the new owners are, either. They’ll face the same unsolvable problems with the same unwanted options and, most likely, reach the same unpopular conclusion: Scorch the earth and start over. Yes, Fire Sale IV is looming, folks. There’s probably no way around it, even if this is the last strategy the new ownership wants to introduce upon being introduced. Dump salaries? Trade talent? Do in their first moves what has defined the problems of this franchise for two decades?

Let’s hope the new owners don’t have some fairy-tale idea of what they’re buying, too. The Marlins owe eight players $95

million already next season. That would be the third-highest payroll in team history on a team that’s going nowhere.

If there were a handful of cheap prospects ready to come up and help bolster a winner, that payroll might be tenable for new owners wanting to take a stand. But this team has the game’s worst minor-league system, according to Baseball America.

So the only way to help the current roster is to buy more players — more pitchers, specifically. And starting pitchers, plural, which is the most expensive commodity to buy. Even then, the margin of error is too slim to be trustworthy. And that wouldn’t buy a contender.

So the best thing the new ownership can do is to educate fans on what’s happening. But these fans don’t need education on fire sales or patience. They can even look at 1997 or 2012 to understand how bad contracts were packaged with good players to be rid of.

On this team full of bad contracts, it’s becoming clear which one is worst simply because it’s the biggest. Giancarlo Stanton is owed $295 million over the next decade. He’s a slugger. He can be a show at times. If the Marlins were winning, his deal would be considered the cost of business.

On a losing team, he’s a strike-out machine, an injury risk and untradeable by himself due to that contract. So how to do it? Well, you could wait a few years and see if he opts out of the deal, as he has a right to do. He might be sick of losing by then.

The other, quicker option is to take the ugly medicine now. He’d probably have to be packaged with a good contract with a good player. There’s really only a few of those on this team. Catcher J.T. Realmuto is the mix of good talent and great contract teams covet as he’s not a free agent until 2021. Christian Yelich makes $7 million next year and has a relatively decent cost for the next five years.

But it will take some time and shrewd thinking to turn around this franchise. Pitcher Wei-Yin Chen is on the front end of a five-year, $80 million deal and was again disappointing before he got hurt. Dee Gordon is still in the opening innings of a five-year, $50 million deal and doesn’t look like the same player since testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Maybe a contending team this July would want a solid veteran like third baseman Martin Prado, who costs $13 million for a couple of more years, if he could get healthy. But there’s little chance the ownership issue will resolve itself by then, meaning no deals for the future can be made this summer.

Everything’s on hold — except this sinking season. It looks worse with each day to the point the new owners have clarity in what this sale really entails. Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria will walk off with an eight-figure payday. The new owners inherit a big pile of stink to clean up.

Dave Hyde