Archive for February, 2010

OK, so “settling” may be a very strong word. Instead, perhaps I am quantitatively saying what I’ve been qualitatively claiming for months now about Jorge Cantu vs. Dan Uggla. With the induction of FanGraphs’ splits, we now have access to situational wOBA that we had to calculate before. They’ve made it much easier to deal with this question, and here I’ll attempt to do so. After the jump, you’ll see me show my work with regards to this issue, with the help of FG’s splits and a little excerpt from The Book.

(Quick side note: There was a minor problem in Stanton’s wOBA calculation.  I’ve edited the post to rectify the situation.  Not much has changed, as he only went from a .355 wOBA to a .359 wOBA, but an error is still an error.  My apologies for the mistake) Surprise #1 You probably won’t see another list with Matt Dominguez ahead of Logan Morrison.  They cite Dominguez’s offensive regression and clamoring Morrison as a big slugging first baseman while ignoring his deficiencies.  Hopefully by the end of these two posts, I’ll have convinced some of you to join my side.  I’m [...]

Quick bites this afternoon, as I’m on a tight schedule. Expect part 2 of John’s hitting prospects series tomorrow, but you probably won’t hear much from me. You’ll also be quite surprised by what John has to say. – Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes pokes fun at David Samson’s claim that new stadium tickets are going real fast. I am very interested in seeing whether the Marlins will draw after 2012; undoubtedly 2012 will look halfway decent, just like the Pittsburgh Pirates’ crowds after PNC Park opened and the Washington Nationals’ fans showed up after Nationals Park just [...]

At the beginning of the week, FanGraphs unveiled splits to the world, giving us yet another reason to spend countless hours on the site (not that I already do that or anything). With this new brand of info, I’ll no longer have to dig up wOBA weights to calculate wOBA for player splits. Neither will I have to use OPS as an approximation to overall hitting talent. The possibilities are boundless for tiny research done by the likes of me. I figured today I’d start looking at some stuff regarding splits, and the first item on the menu in my [...]

This prospect series is going to be a bit different from your normal, everyday prospect listing. I went over earlier about the projections I’m going to be posting up, and now you’ll see exactly what I mean in action. This series is going to break down the top seven hitting prospects the Marlins have, and ranking them based off their projected WAR.  Some massive things to keep in mind: like I said before, the projection system isn’t meant to be an exact result but rather a rough estimation.  The stat WAR is basically the same thing.  So it’s the end [...]

The projection systems of choice seem to really like Cameron Maybin. It’s an oddity, given the fact that Maybin played so poorly at the start of last season. I wanted to take a quick look at the projection lines of the sources available to us from FanGraphs and see what all the fuss is about.

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 [...]

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).

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 [...]

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 [...]