Miami Marlins Best To Wear Jersey Number Series No. 15: Brian Anderson

Don't let anyone ever tell you defense doesn't matter, Miami Marlins fans.

It wins championships. It can keep your team game in the game. And every now and then...it can help land you a spot on Marlin Maniac's Best To Wear The Miami Marlins Jersey Number Series.

Welcome to the club, Brian Anderson. The No. 15 Marlins jersey never looked better.

Well, it certainly never looked more present at any rate. Anderson's 506 career Marlins games in the jersey played a large part in letting him cut down the nets here, if you'll allow the sports metaphor mixing. So too did that aforementioned defense, at least in comparison to his closest competition on this list. Yet at the end of the day, there's just no getting around the fact that Brian Anderson played pretty darn good baseball for about three years there...and then proceeded to surely and swiftly drive off a cliff in just about every way. Less hard hit balls, lower exit velocity, no longer being able to outperform his expected stats. Even so, he kept compiling Marlins WAR to the last.

Top 25 for Miami in games played (506), doubles (106), home runs (57), RBI (233), and a 9.5 WAR.

Solid work, through and through.

Consider the Marlin Maniac crew just a touch dismayed that 1997-1999 Cliff Floyd and 2000-2002 Kevin Millar weren't able to hold Anderson off. Floyd had Miami's first 20/20 season in 1998 (22 HR/27 SB). Millar clubbed 20 HRs and 85 RBI to go with a .314/.374/.557 slash line during the 2021 campaign. Yet neither one of those seasons (2.3 and 2.8 respectively) was worth more than Anderson's 3.1 WAR 2018, 3.2 WAR, or the ridiculous pace he was on in 2020 when he hit 11 HRs in just 59 games.

Thus Floyd and Millar are relegated to the extremely honorable mentions tier. At least Cliff has his No. 30 award to console himself. As for Millar...Anderson probably shouldn't expect an Intentional Talk invite anytime soon.

Beyond those names, Gaby Sanchez did rep the uniform for two seasons, including his career best 2011 that landed him a spot in the All-Star game. Unfortunately, that 2.7 WAR effort gets dragged down by the -0.9 follow up in 2012. Even if 2012 had gone well though for Gaby, giving him a Marlins jersey award would have been tough. At some point you have to ding a man for the lack of consistency.

Sanchez wore three different numbers with the Marlins before the jersey switched from Florida to Miami, giving him four different Marlins circles on his Baseball Reference page. Plus, regardless of the counting stats, all real Marlins fans know that the only season that counts with Gaby is the one where he clotheslines Nyjer Morgan in 2009. Which, hilariously enough, you can see Sanchez and Millar discuss extensively in this 2021 MLB Network interview, along with their take on which of them is the real No. 15 title winner.

By Marlin Maniac's Miami MarlinsJersey Number Series standard though? By the time of that interview, like so many ground balls to third base, Brian Anderson had it all sewn up.