Blogservations: Disappointing showing versus the Mets

On the final homestand of the season, I expected a better performance from our Marlins, especially against the New York Mets. Unfortunately, that was simply not to be.

A great Ricky Nolasco start is thrown away by Leo Nunez

I heard recently that the team was likely to stick with Leo Nunez as their closer for next year, provided they don’t find a cheap veteran. I don’t know how many saves or home runs Nunez has to give up before the team gives up on him, but I do know that he isn’t as good as the team thinks. Nunez likely isn’t a pitcher with a 5.19 FIP/5.22 tRA, but he certainly wasn’t the kid with the 3.77 FIP/3.85 tRA from last season either. Rather, he is probably somewhere in between these two. In the past, he’s had problems with the home run, so maybe he’s prone and last season was an utter “fluke to end all flukes.” If so, the team is in worse shape in high leverage situations than I thought.

Nunez blew his seventh save of the season Friday evening, throwing a win away for Ricky Nolasco. Nolasco put up one of his best outings of late, striking out seven and walking one in seven innings. He also gave up a home run, which while disappointing was not surprising. Ricky induced 10 grounders out of his 18 balls in play, continuing an interesting trend of forcing more balls on the ground. He also got eight whiffs and was OK in terms of the strike zone, getting 62% of his pitches over for strikes. I wanted to take a look at Ricky’s pitch selection and location yesterday to see where those grounders were coming from. Data as always courtesy of Brooks Baseball.

The shaded in data points are the ones that in which he induced a groundball, while the others are the ones in which he induced his remaining balls in play (I know, I messed up on the slider, there was only one put in play and it was popped up, so it had to be not shaded). This does not include a bunt force out. You can see that of the pitches that were knocked into the ground, the majority were low, and three of them came on the changeup. I was surprised how many grounders he was able to force with fastball as well, as the placement doesn’t appear particularly impressive. I’m also surprised at how only one of those changeups in the lower left-hand corner were knocked into the ground; how did those hitters golf the other two?

Ricky pitched well enough to get the win, and it’s a shame Nunez threw it away. The good news is he didn’t give up a home run, but the bad news is he threw in two walks and allowed three hits.

Hitters were mostly laying off any of his other stuff, swinging only at the bad locations up and around the middle of the plate. It doesn’t help that Nunez got squeezed on the low strike, but that seems to be a time-honored tradition by the umpires.

Plate umpire Bill Hohn missed that low strike a lot, on both sides. While you may consider that “fair,” I consider that grounds for continuing discussion about automatizing the strike zone. There’s little reason not to.

In any case, the loss was fairly irrelevant, as the team is all but out of the race, but it was a frustrating one nonetheless. I hope the team continues to look for bullpen options and finds some gems like they did last offseason with Kiko Calero and Brian Sanches. Depending on Nunez is just not an option.

Cameron Maybin saw the ball well.

Cameron Maybin was only supposed to be in there for two games in this series, taking a day off versus the lefties in favor of Brett Carroll. However, when Cody Ross went down after getting hit in the wrist by a pitch on Saturday night, Maybin proceeded to get two PA’s and turn them into a walk and a home run. Maybin had four hits in the series, including a double as well. He’s hit .269/.342/.463 since returning from Triple-A New Orleans, and he’s walked eight times since returning, though only twice since the first week of the month. He’s also made more contact, evidenced by a slightly smaller K% (21.6%, 31.1% on the season). Of course, none of those numbers from this month mean anything; the sample size is way too small for us to get all excited. He’s not quite there yet, but if he can start making some more contact, he should be an exciting player to watch next season. I already think he’s going to be a decent outfielder and a plus runner, we just need to see if he’s going to get on base enough to be a contributor.