Fish Bites
By Michael Jong
Quick late links for this afternoon. Hopefully more content to come.
– The Marlins are off in Kuwait right now to meet the troops. Among the players there will be John Baker, who is blogging about the affair over at his personal blog. I love the name “ManBearWolf” myself, reminds me of that South Park episode with Mr. Al Gore. You can also follow Baker on Twitter.
– Among the questions answered in Joe Frisaro’s latest mailbag is regarding the batting order slot which Cameron Maybin will occupy. The answer appears to be something like #2 and #8. My answer is #7 or something, because he’s not one of our top three hitters, but he’s not the worst one either.
– Want to see something cool? If you do a Google search for “Florida Marlins,” I end up third on the first page. A little hard work pays off sometimes.
– Minor League Ball reader dougdirt compiled various prospect lists and used tweaked values from research done by Victor Wang and compiled by the good folks at BtB. The result is the value of each minor league system. The Marlins came out pretty bad, worth almost $80M and a tick below the Houston Astros’ system, which I previously referred to as “decimated.” Not pretty.
– Nick Steiner over at THT tells us that pitchers have even less control than we think. This makes me feel bad. (H/T Tango)
– Ian H. over at the Blue Jay Hunter had a few questions for me about how our respective teams can compete in an Eastern division full of big pockets. Player development and shrewd personnel moves have to be made, but it doesn’t always work out nicely like it has for the Marlins. Not everyone is lucky enough to stumble into a franchise player like Hanley Ramirez.
– Speaking of Tango, he put up two threads over at FanGraphs about the DH. One proposes the reasons supporting pitchers hitting. The other offers solutions/compromises in favor of making the pitcher hit less, if at all. My favorite idea? Let it be the home manager’s choice. Also, one commenter on the DH thread offered to make it the choice of the opposing manager to choose a DH from a list of bench players. Those ideas would be a lot more fun, and we’d have a unified situation between both leagues.
– Now for some FanSided goodness. Wally over Kings of Kauffman reflects on, among other things, his supposed negativity about the Kansas City Royals in his latest edition of Slugger Snacks.
– Dustin Staggers over at Rayhawk Review wonders if B.J. Upton is even interested in staying in Tampa.
– Taylor over at SodoMojo talks about the gap between the AL and NL again. He says a good deal of it is in the dealing with the DH. I tend to disagree. Sure, if you wanted to compare between a pitcher’s performance in the NL versus the AL, naturally his AL performance would be worse. But that doesn’t make any contextual sense. The AL has a higher run environment, in part (or perhaps primarily) because of the DH. If you compare WAR for a move from AL to NL, for example, your AL WAR is going to be measured against the AL run scoring average, while it will be the other case for the NL component. Pitching numbers from the AL and NL simply are not comparable.
Something else is up in Interleague Play, something perhaps involving the inclusion of full-time AL DH versus the use of inferior bench players for DH in the NL. But it is difficult to correct for, I would say. The gap may not be as wide as it’s currently painted, but I think it is there and it is significant.
– Smitty over at Rum Bunter checked out Garret Jones’ home runs (along with many others) on HitTracker. Turns out Jones had his fair share of “Just Enoughs.” By the way, we should all thank Greg Rybarczyk for establishing HitTracker Online, which is the best source for info on home runs on the Web.
– Fetch over at Twinkie Talk hates then loves the signing of Jim Thome. $1.5M for Thome is not all that bad, and how much worse could Jason Kubel be on defense compared to Delmon Young. That remains to be seen. That and Thome is supposed to be a “bench player.” Not sure, not sure about this at all.
– By the way, if you’re a fan of the Twins, perhaps you should go ahead and also check out Fetch’s Top 15 prospects series. Here’s #11.
– Ed over at Deep Left Field worries about the Cleveland Indians’ rotation options. Also, he fires up a little Fire Joe Morgan and rants about winz and how bad a stat it is. Right on, my friend, testify! Ed’s one of the best new bloggers we have here at FanSided, so go check him out, he seems to know his stuff.