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3 overreactions from the Miami Marlins getting swept by Arizona
The Miami Marlins just got swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Fish lost 5-4 on Monday, 5-4 again on Tuesday and 8-7 on Wednesday. Those are three games which The Fish lost by just one run. It’s still losing three games to one of the worst teams in the Majors. Naturally the fans a re worried. What is going on? How could this be possible? The Miami Marlins went from 12-9 to 12-12 in three days and it’s alarming.
The Miami Marlins were swept by a team clearly in need of a rebuild.
It’s important to point out that this was just three games and that as I already mentioned they were decided by just one run. This means that bad luck played a pretty big part in the losses and that it wasn’t merely the Miami Marlins being “worse” as a team. This isn’t to excuse this performance, but to point out that it’s a very small sample size.
Naturally a series loss of this magnitude, means that fans are going to have their concerns and unfortunately also jump to conclusions and beliefs based on an again very small sample size. The smart thing to do is to analyze the concerns and see just how valid or not valid they really are. What are the concerns? The concerns are mainly focused on the aces and the rest of the team. Let’s dive in…
#1: “Pablo Lopez is not that good after all”
I’ve seen this one mentioned on Twitter quite a bit after the Miami Marlins lost the first game of the series, and it bothered me quite a bit. Pablo Lopez is an elite starting pitcher and has been phenomenal this season. He has a 1.29 ERA/2.68 FIP at the moment. Is that not a mark of a potential Cy Young contender?! How many aces never have bad starts?!
It’s tough to admit as a fan, but aces aren’t always going to be great. There are going to be times when an ace has a bad day. Maybe there’s an ache or pain, maybe the weather affects him badly… There are many different things that can affect a pitcher’s ability on any one particular day. It’s safe to say that Pablo is not a bad pitcher.
So how bad was his performance in this one game? Well, he gave up 4 runs (3 earned) in 4.2 innings. That’s pretty bad, but he also had 7 strikeouts and one of those runs was a home run. Home runs can happen because of one bad pitch, or even a gust of air that just randomly happened and pushed the ball over the fence. Pablo got unlucky but this performance wasn’t indicative of his true talent level.
The Fish actually scored the 4 tying runs in the 7’th inning, but unfortunately the Arizona Diamondbacks scored one more prior to that at the top of the inning, and that run ended up deciding the result of the whole ballgame. Pablo Lopez had a bad game and then bad luck crept in, Pablo is still an ace and it’s better to just move on and forget this particular outing.
#2: “Trevor Rogers is done”.
I already wrote about how Trevor Rogers is still an ace and… yes he still is. Just like Pablo Lopez in the previous game, Rogers had a bad game for the Miami Marlins and gave up 2 home runs among the 5 runs that he gave up in 4.1 innings on Tuesday. It was a bad game no doubt, but are we just going to pretend that bad games don’t happen for aces?
Did we all forget how great he was just last year? How he had a 2.64 ERA/2.55 FIP in 133.0 IP? How he could’ve been a Cy Young contender if he pitched more innings? Trevor Rogers is not done and is surely still an ace. He just had his bad starts happen earlier than usual and all in a short period of time.
Do you remember how terrible Max Fried was for Atlanta in the beginning of last season? Or how about Luis Castillo for Cincinnati? Those guys were horrible to start the season, but then their results improved and they ended up finishing with solid results by the end of the season. Fried had a 3.04 ERA in fact. Trevor Rogers could be following the same trajectory as them.
Trevor may be tipping his fastballs and once he fixes that, he could very well be back to his old self. This terrible outing will likely be forgotten once he’s back to chasing a Cy Young award. In the meantime while his outing may have been the culprit for the loss in the second game of the series, his previous two outings were very good as he was righting the ship in his performance this season.
#3 The Miami Marlins aren’t a playoff team
This last one is probably the worst of the overreactions. The Miami Marlins have one of the best pitching staffs in the Majors. This is a team that just needs better hitting. Maybe even simply better timed hitting, as The Fish lost all of these games by a very small margin, as I feel that I should keep stressing. This is a team that with an uptick in hitting should be able to lock-up a playoff spot now that there are more playoff teams in general.
I think that we should keep in mind that a three game series in May isn’t a good example of how the season is going to end up being in October. There is the trading deadline coming up for example, so the team might not even look the same come July. It’s definitely way too early to write The Fish off.
The third game of the series had a culprit in Anthony Bender, who blew a save in what would’ve been a Miami Marlins win. That’s not a knock on Bender, who is much better than he has been so far this season, but it’s again an instance of one player’s bad performance bringing the team down in a close game.
The three game series with Arizona was a disappointment for the Miami Marlins and the fans. It’s pretty obvious that we’re a better team than Arizona and should’ve won this series. Call it too much confidence, but I truly believe in this team and that we can go to the playoffs and make a deep run. Let’s not let this one early series crush our hopes. “Juntos Miami!”