“I just got scared. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t rotate,” [Ramirez] said Monday before taking treatment. “I was hoping I could play today, but I can’t. I’ve just got to go day to day. I’m feeling it in my legs, down the left side. A tingle in my leg. That’s not a good sign. That’s what we’re worried about right now, the feeling in my legs. Hopefully it’ll be better in a couple of days.”

The combination of lower back stiffness and a few of those symptoms he mentioned sound like classical symptoms of a herniated disc. Right now, the injury is being classified as lower back stiffness, but it is possible that the swing that supposedly brought on the onset of the back stiffness could have been enough trauma to cause a herniation. Having said that, Ramirez also mentioned that he had felt his back was not well prior to the incident, so it could have easily been an injury from earlier in the season that was only aggravated during that swing.

A herniated disc is a situation where the nucleus pulposus of the intervertebral discs slips or bulges out of its normal position. The nucleus pulposus is the soft aspect of the disc that serves as a “shock absorber” for the spine. A tear in the annulus fibrosus, or fibrous tissue ring, surrounding the nucleus pulposus can allow the nucleus to bulge out of its positioning and potentially impinge on nerves originating from the spinal cord. The parenthesia or tingling that Ramirez is describing is a possible sign that the herniation of the nucleus pulposus is impinging on nerves serving his leg. The sciatic nerve originates the lumbar spine around that region and is the primary origin of many of the nerves of the lower leg; a pinching of that nerve could cause this problem.

Of course, without doing a physical examination, I could not determine whether or not a slipped disc is the cause of injury, but that was the first thing that I thought of. If it is anything more serious than simple stiffness or inflammation, there is a good chance Ramirez will miss time on the disabled list, and that could be seen as either a good thing or a really bad thing.

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This trio of players is going to play a pivotal role not only during this 2011 season but in the years to come. Morrison, Sanchez, and Stanton are each going to be vital parts of the team for the next few years, and the early starts to their 2011 season along with their 2010 performances have only continued to solidify that fact. With the Marlins heading into the new stadium next season, they will need a core nucleus of young stars to build around, and whom better to go to than these three gentlemen?

This of course brings me to my obvious next point. How will the Marlins ensure that they keep these three players over a long period of time? Sure, each of them are under team control through 2015, but the Marlins would be wise to strike a deal with each of these players so that their tenure here can be more assured. In the last two seasons, the Fish have shown a willingness to sign the right players to long-term deals, inking Hanley Ramirez, Josh Johnson, and Ricky Nolasco to multi-year contracts that bought out some free-agent seasons from these players. For this trio, the team could look to take this a step further and extend immediately, such as by the end of this season.

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First, there were the game implications. The Marlins had runners on first and third with one out in a tied game in the 12th inning, a situation which warranted a Leverage Index (LI) of 5.5. The particular play was going to have five and half times more impact on the game than the average plate appearance, and the Marlins were unfortunate enough to send Emilio Bonifacio to the plate. The fly ball itself was not much of a fly ball at all, but rather a shallow popup to right center field and more or less directly at Nate Schierholtz, the Giants’ best outfield arm. Cousins went for the tag in this case despite the shallowness of the fly ball and was able to make it to the plate despite a good throw.

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That first line, representing Nolasco’s 2011 season, contains the best matching between his peripherals and his ERA that he has displayed in a long time. For the past two seasons he has struggled mightily to make these numbers match despite pitching a very skillful game plan. The Marlins were clearly aware of the large gaps in on-field value and peripheral performance for Nolasco, given that they signed him to a lucrative three-year deal that will buy out his first free agent season.

What has made this season so different? Let’s look at the typical culprits.

For Nolasco’s career, he has a .300 BABIP and a 69.5 percent LOB%, meaning that he has actually been just about league average for his career (about 30 percent of all balls in play land for hits and about 30 percent of runners on base score). In 2008, he posted a “lucky” BABIP of .271, which was part of the reason why he pitched so well that season, but since then his numbers have been so consistent in terms of peripherals and BABIP that I just sort of passively accepted many of his underlying statistics. The truth is likely that he has some room for regression in BABIP and plenty in stranding runners.

Speaking of stranding runners, there might be one more thing that we want to look at.
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