The Marlins are once again digging through the scraps of other teams, looking to find bullpen gems. I like this yearly tradition in part because it means signings like the ones given to Fernando Rodney or Brandon Lyon this year will never be made by our front office.

While I’m not questioning their ever-continuing quest to pick up some spare arms for the pen, I do want to point out that the Marlins actually have a surplus of starting arms that can be used in the bullpen this season. Though there appears to be a race for the last three slots on the Marlins’ staff, for all intents and purposes it would appear two of those slots are likely locked up. Barring injury or a freakishly bad Spring Training, the Marlins are almost certainly going to give two of those slots to Anibal Sanchez and Chris Volstad.

This would leave us one slot for three remaining pitchers. Of the three, Sean West is least likely to see major league playing time outside of an injury. My guess is that the team will let him stew in Triple-A a while longer before promoting him to the rotation possibly next year. This leaves us two options, one of which should head to the pen: Rick VandeHurk and Andrew Miller. Let’s delve a bit into those two. Continue Reading »

In the near future, a lot of my articles are going to feature projection lines while talking about prospects. These are rough projections that I have done myself and I want to use this post to explain how I got these projections.

The first thing is to understand what peripherals are needed in order to calculate a slash lines. These are BB%, K%, BABIP, and Power (Both ISO and rate of HRs). Continue Reading »

Over the weekend I took a gander at Joe Frisaro’s latest inbox piece, where he answers some mail from the readers. Sometimes these articles provide some insight to the team’s workings, but for the most part they are built to appease the MLB.com audience, which is of course no Beyond the Box Score group of readers. Still, sometimes it’s worth a look.

Well, this weekend I was interested because the highlighted question from the article title was this one.

Have the Marlins ever tried to put Dan Uggla at third, Chris Coghlan at second and Jorge Cantu at first? That sounds good to me.
– Cameron D., Rochester, N.Y.

Now, I think this is a question most Marlins fans have probably asked at one time or another. Just this recent offseason I discussed the possibility of moving Dan Uggla to third base, and I used the Fans Scouting Report to help me give an estimate of performance. So I think this is a question deserving of a fairly serious response about baseball. Well, what Frisaro gives us is a bunch of B.S. instead. Continue Reading »

News is slow today, real slow. And so in classic blog style, I’m going to respond to another blogger’s response. Here’s Craig from FishStripes on the continuing story of the Marlins and Russell Branyan.

I must admit, I’m not excited about this. If, as the report goes, it would mean that Branyan would be the everyday first baseman, that means the front office believes that [Logan Morrison] isn’t ready. I have no problem with that, but it also means they don’t think much of [Gaby Sanchez'] talents, and that I have a problem with.

There is no upside to Branyan being an everyday first baseman. The man is 34 years-old, and at that age he is in his declining years as a player. A hitter peaks around age 30. Yes, 30. And then there is a steep decline which kicks in around age 33. Of course, everyone is different, but it happens around that age give or take a year or two. Branyan is past that age and to expect him to even put up the numbers he did last season is expecting too much. Could he? Yeah, I guess. But it isn’t the way to bet.

Gaby on the other hand is starting to come into his own, age-wise. And this, “he will never be more than a platoon player in the majors” is far from known. No one knows what he will do in the majors; he has never been given the chance to show his wares. What we do know about Gaby is that he has shown the ability to have plate discipline in the minors and he has also shown signs of being able to hit and field the position neatly.

Craig does bring up some good points. There’s very little upside in bringing in Branyan. Last season, Branyan had a .368 wOBA in his only season as a full-time starter; he isn’t likely to repeat that kind of performance. He has injury history and he is on the old side. He isn’t going to get any better. But I’d venture to say he won’t get too much worse either. The projection systems have him at around .355 wOBA. Put him at .350, let’s say. Would you bet on Gaby Sanchez making a .350 wOBA this season? The projections have him around .340-something, with CHONE and Bill James high and the Fans and Marcel low. Continue Reading »

For Saber-Terms, I’ve been working my way towards discussing Wins Above Replacement by setting the groundwork for a lot of that discussion. Today, I’d like to talk about one of the more controversial (even though it really shouldn’t be) concepts that those new to sabermetrics find hard to accept: replacement level. Continue Reading »