With the season over, I’d had to introduce a lot of series that would be of interest to fans as we move into the offseason. With my other writing workload, it’s become fairly difficult to sit in one day and write something Marlins related off the top of my head. So I decided what I’ll do is make a schedule and stick to it on a weekly basis. Here’s the plan for Marlin Maniac, tentatively.
Monday: Offseason Outlooks
On Monday’s I’ll be doing pieces on the Marlins offseason. It could be in the form of a player profile, like the profiles for [...]

Welcome back to Revisiting ‘03, a sabermetric look at the amazing 2003 Florida Marlins team that won the World Series. As you can tell from the title, we have but one target for today’s piece, and that man is the D-Train, former Marlins lefty starter Dontrelle Willis. Let’s take a look at that 2003 season and what went right (or wrong) with his career as he went forward. Let’s hop aboard the D-Train once again.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to calculate WAR for each Marlins player on my own and see how the results turned out. It was mostly a practice for me for future attempts at determining stuff like MVP awards for the BBA. On a whim, I decided to start with pitcher WAR, since I already had some results and was intrigued to find out how the Marlins stacked up.
Now, pitcher WAR is interesting because there is a lot of variation in the way different sources calculate it. There are two primary sources for WAR, FanGraphs and Rally’s WAR [...]

Not much going on in the world of baseball today, you know, other than the World Series. It’s the first World Series that I’ve been excited about for some time. Despite the fact that I don’t like either team, you can’t deny that this was probably the most compelling matchup we were going to get this year.
- Game 1 starts tonight, and the matchup is a doozy: Cliff Lee will take the mound for the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies, going up against marquee free agent signing C.C. Sabathia for the New York Yankees. These are two of the best pitchers [...]

Maniac reader DavidC asked if I could take a look at the Marlins and dig through for an explanation as to why the Marlins have done so well despite a limited budget. I did something to the opposite effect for Beyond the Box Score, examining why teh Washington Nationals have done so poorly over the last few years. I decided I’d start digging through some generally accepted ideas about the Marlins and how they have succeeded on a low payroll, but I figured any conversation about this had to begin with something that related wins to money. For that, we’re [...]

We just recently completed the first annual BBA awards for the 2009 season. Let me first say that it was a blast to vote and be a part of this, and even if I didn’t always agree with the consensus, I was more than happy to see that the results mostly jived with my thinking. We’ve got a solid group of forward thinking bloggers here, and I hope that we can continue doing this in the future so we can continue to see the insight of the true fans of the game in the awards voting.
Without further ado, here are [...]

You guys saw Part 1, right? If you didn’t, here’s a recap:
10. Chris Carpenter, RHP, St. Louis Cardinals (6.08 WAR)
9. Prince Fielder, 1B, Milwaukee Brewers (5.93 WAR)
8. Dan Haren, RHP, Arizona Diamondbacks (6.25 WAR)
7. Javier Vazquez, RHP, Atlanta Braves (6.34 WAR)
6. Adrian Gonzalez, 1B, San Diego Padres (6.34 WAR)
Now here’s the conclusion of my BBA ballot, rounding out #5 all the way to #1.

Congratulations to Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals and Tim Lincecum of the San Francisco Giants for winning the BBA’s award for the AL and NL Cy Young awards respectively. This is a great year to debunk the myth of the pitcher win-loss record, and I’m happy that our group’s voters saw that these two pitchers were simply amazing and deserved their awards.
As for the MVP award, this season the National League is going to be a ridiculously difficult season to judge the MVP. There are as many as five excellent candidates for the award this season between pitchers and position players. How do we determine [...]

Last week, I took a look at the Marlins’ Jorge Cantu, one of the Marlins’ important arbitration cases this offseason. Today’s offseason outlook piece is going to look back and forward on the season of center fielder and fan favorite Cody Ross. Ross is one of my favorite players on this team, if anything for that ridiculous commercial involving the boom box playing his “Cody, Cody” chant. But the Maniac would never let his subjective opinion of a likable player like Cody get in the way of an objective analysis of Cody’s play. He won’t get any extra points for [...]

So I’ve gotten some flak for not having Marlins fan favorite Chris Coghlan on my NL Rookie of the Year ballot for the BBA, favoring the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Andrew McCutchen. In the ballot, I used WAR, calculated on my own using the guidelines as broken down by FanGraphs and by Tom Tango, who came up with the general WAR formula. In this space, I’ll try to break down how I achieved the conclusion.
First off, I’ll begin by defining how I planned on choosing the Rookie of the Year (as I will with all the other awards) and what I’ll do [...]