Archive for March, 2011

Today, we’ll finish up the 2011 Marlins Season Preview by going into some bold predictions for the team this season. If you don’t recall, here’s what last year’s format looked like, and you can expect something similar in the next few paragraphs. Here’s what I expect to see happen in 2011 for your Florida Marlins. Record: 84 – 78, 3rd Place Not much change in the overall standing of the Marlins despite overall dramatic changes by the team since the end of 2010. While my projections pegged them very optimistically at 88 wins, I suggest that that probably won’t happen. [...]

Since I just posted that I planned on reinstating Fish Bites on Wednesdays this season, I figured today was a good day to actually start backing up what I claimed as my plan. Here are some of the more interesting links from this past week in Marlins baseball. – The Marlins made their decisions on the final roster. Scott Cousins is in, Burke Badenhop is out, and I’m slightly disappointed. The Marlins made the bullpen decision based not on who is the better pitcher but rather which decision would allow the team the most options. I don’t blame them, but [...]

As the season comes to a forefront, I just wanted to mention some of the features I’ll be posting here at Marlin Maniac for the upcoming 2011 season. In the 2010 season, I didn’t fully fulfill my obligations that I set for myself before the regular season, and I apologize for doing so. With medical school now in the picture, I am certain it will be difficult for me to get as much awesome Marlins content as I would like to get out, but rest assured that I will be working as hard as possible to get you Maniacs the [...]

(EDIT: Looks like the Marlins did not listen to me with regards to the bullpen, going with Sanches over Badenhop. It won’t affect the team much, but it is the worst move.) With the Marlins (and Marlin Maniac) winding down their “season preview” in preparation for the start of the regular season, the team is down to just a few spots left in the battle for starting positions are roster spots. The team is currently deciding on either Donnie Murphy or Emilio Bonifacio for their vacant third base position, with the team seemingly out of the running for any outside [...]

Recently FanGraphs debuted their 2011 Organizational Rankings, and I was curious to see when the Marlins would show up this season. It turns out this season the writers of FanGraphs had the Marlins at a lower ranking than the team occupied last season. This year, FanGraphs has the Marlins ranked at 27th, the fourth worst overall organization in baseball in terms mid- to long-term health. OK, before any of us get our panties in a bunch because of the poor ranking, especially from a group of writers whom I respect a good deal, let’s take a look at the criteria [...]

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to any Marlins fan. Matt Dominguez has officially lost his job as starting job at third base, opening the race for third base wide open with one week left. Throughout the offseason, we were expecting this to happen; the Marlins had no major backup plans going into Spring Training and were fully expecting Dominguez to impress and win the job. It seemed like early in Spring Training he was doing just that; witness this blog post by the Palm Beach post’s Joe Capozzi from March 6th or this article by Clark Spencer [...]

We finish up our brief Marlins fantasy series by discussing the pitchers of the Marlins staff and their effect on the 2011 fantasy baseball season. Player IP ERA WHIP K W Sv $ Mixed $ NL Josh Johnson 198 3.11 1.26 166 14 0 $15 $18 I can almost guarantee you that Johnson will outperform some of these numbers projected here by PECOTA. I’m almost certain he will have strike out more than 166 batters this season; in 198 innings, that projects to 7.5 strikeouts per nine innings, the lowest mark he would have ever put up in the majors [...]

Today, I’m taking a break from discussing the realities of Marlins baseball. The truth is that the season preview is winding to a close as the regular season approaches, and the only real thing left to do is fill in fantasy baseball players who are drastically fitting in their final drafts of the 2011 season with all the Marlins information that they could possibly need. Thus, today I’ll take a look at fantasy options on the current Marlins team, both hitters and pitchers. What follows is the hitters section, complete with estimated dollar auction values and projected stats produced by [...]

Earlier today, I showed the projected platoon splits for the Marlins for the 2011 season. The cool thing about projecting not only overall performance but splits is that we can use that information to build optimized lineups following the rules laid out by Tom Tango, MGL, and Andy Dolphin in The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. These lineups are designed to get the most runs out of a given set of players based on the advantages inherent in any one lineup spot. As a reminder, here’s The Book’s basic rule for lineup building: The Book says: Your three best [...]

My sincere apologies for missing out on a Thursday article, but the Maniac was held up all day in class and other school-related business. To make up for it, I have a double-shot of platoon-related goodness set up for the fellow Marlin Maniacs today, first in the form of projected platoon splits for the Marlins in the 2011 season. The following are the projected wOBA splits against lefties and righties for Marlins hitters in 2011. These numbers are based off career platoon splits regressed appropriately to the three-year averages for league-wide splits as described in The Book. I used their [...]