With the Hall of Fame voting looming and the annual discussions on who should be in, who shouldn’t be in, and why Bert Blyleven was vastly superior to Jack Morris (agreed), I had a few thoughts on the Hall of Fame with regards to the Marlins. I looked back last year at two articles that I had written on the Fish regarding the past and future of the Marlins in the Hall, and I’d like to look back a year later and consider the points I made back then further.

Kevin Brown, step right up

Only to be shot down, I’m sure. Kevin Brown is exactly the type of guy who gets lost in the shuffle when it comes to the Hall of Fame vote. In the prime of his career, Brown played for three different teams, the Marlins, San Diego Padres, and Los Angeles Dodgers, only one of which got large recognition as a decently sized market. When Brown arrived in Los Angeles, he did so carrying some pretty hefty baggage in the form of the first $100+M contract in MLB history. It didn’t help, of course, that his attitude was never the best in the business either*.

*Quick aside: Both Brown and Gary Sheffield were not the nicest of people, yet they are the two most likely Hall of Famers who played significant time in a Marlins uniform. Weird how that turned out.

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This got me thinking about the past rookies in Marlins history. The Fish have always been a team that depended on young players for its success, and so a plethora of rookies have contributed to the Marlins in their past. Who were some of the best the Fish have ever debuted? Let’s take a look at some of the top rookie performances according to Rally’s WAR (rWAR), as shown on Baseball-Reference.

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The Marlins need pitching (and a new owner). They have two starters with an era under 4.0. Why they’d sign Vazquez with a 5.32 era is beyond my understanding. They can make do with any of their centerfield and third base options but they’ll go nowhere again without a better starting rotation.

How can we determine if the Marlins were right to go to Vazquez to solidify their rotation? Do the Fish have enough to compete? To find out, let’s quickly reference the best guess we can come up with for how well these guys will play: the projection systems. I took a look at five different projection sources: the Bill James Handbook, the Fans projections from FanGraphs, ZiPS, Heater Magazine’s recently released Graphical Player 2011 (in which yours truly contributed on the Marlins’ playing time projections and commentary), and my own crude projections. I took a look at each system’s guess at the expected starters’ 2011 ERA, then plugged my own playing time projections to find out an approximate WAR value for each player. Let’s get to the results.

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On top of that, $11.5 million is paying Nolasco as if he’s approximately a 2.5-win pitcher. Nolasco easily exceeded that in both 2008 and 2009 and even matched that in an injury-shortened 2010 season. All the Marlins need is for him to do is repeat 2010 three more times and they’ll have broken even. Is that feasible for Nolasco?

Of course, this sparked yet another argument about how FanGraphs chooses to calculate its pitcher Wins Above Replacement (WAR). As we all know, FanGraphs uses FIP to calculate WAR, while Baseball-Reference uses Rally’s WAR formula which takes straight runs allowed and adjusts for quality of oppnent, then subtracts defensive run impact. I mentioned before that at times these methods yield drastically different results, and that in particular was the case for Nolasco in 2009.

So the question that is once again asked is how can we determine how Nolasco will pitch in the future? Are his recent 2009 and 2010 struggles (of varying degrees, of course) a product of simple bad luck or is there something more to it that needs to be considered when accounting for WAR? Let’s review what each version of WAR measures and see how these match up with Nolasco’s game.

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