Fish Bites

Nom nom nom, Fish Bites for your Wednesday mid-morning.

– Here’s a list of all eligible free agents who were offered arbitration. As expected, the Marlins did not offer arbitration for Nick Johnson and Kiko Calero. Again, dumb move.

– The Sun-Sentinel’s Juan C. Rodriguez has two interesting blog posts for us. In one, he points out that the payroll could go up to $40M. In the other, he details the request of the Marlins to get Mike Rowe of Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” show to come by and profile the Marlins’ stadium construction.

– Joe Capozzi of the Palm Beach Post asks if Andre Dawson belongs in the Hall of Fame. Look, we all like Dawson because he was a Marlin in the early days. But if you check out Rally’s WAR page for Dawson, you can see that Dawson lost about 2.5 WAR over the last four seasons in the bigs that he spent toiling between Florida and the Boston Red Sox. Had he not gone through those seasons, he would have come close to 60 WAR, which would have been enough to warrant some consideration. Dawson was great in his heyday with the Montreal Expos, but was a slightly above average player for much of his career after that, including that MVP season with the Chicago Cubs. Not sure if that means Hall of Fame to you, but I think he’s close in my book. With Jim Rice getting in (sigh), you figure Dawson’s got a good shot.

– As I mentioned before, FanGraphs is doing its 2010 Fan Projections! David Appelman is doing daily suggestions for players to project, and two Marlins have already shown up in the first two days. Yesterday, Ricky Nolasco was part of the three suggested players, and today Josh Johnson is on tap. So go out and vote, and make sure that you vote for the other suggested players if you can, too!

– Boston owner and former Marlins head honcho John Henry talked about “competitive balance” again. He asks essentially for a soft cap with a luxury tax that gets redistributed similarly to the way revenue sharing currently is done. Rob Neyer takes Henry to task about the business end and most of his ridiculous commentary. Tom Tango also has a say about the competitive balance issue. Two of my favorite writers at work.

– Justin Klugh over at That Balls Outta Here gets mad about fluff pieces and the amount of people at the World Series parade last year for the Philadelphia Phillies. Funny stuff, but there’s also some content in there, to avoid it being a fluff piece as well.

– Two great pieces over at SodoMojo. First off, Taylor is all gloom and doom about the Yankees and Roy Halladay. To be fair though, they’d have to probably give up at least either Joba Chamberlain or Phil Hughes to get Halladay, so there will be a little less to complain about. Also, Harrison’s got his season awards during Thanksgiving. I don’t think Joel Pineiro deserves that Carlos Silva-based shot, however. Pineiro did much better in terms of three true outcomes than Silva ever could hope to have attained.

– Wally Fish over at Kings of Kauffman reflects on the life and times of Ruben Gotay (he’s not dead, but he did sign with the St. Louis Cardinals recently).

– Finally, Fetch offers us his NL MVP ballot over at Twinkie Talk. I will say that Hanley Ramirez’s defense has indeed gotten better, as noted by UZR. No worries there.