2006 Florida Marlins

Oh, boy—short straw again. Justice is colder than a dead NRA member clinging to his phallic birthright, so—of course—it’s me and the Marlins mano à mano, as usual, the perfect plot for a sprightly musical featuring Fred Astaire and Attila the Hun.

Yes, it’s the perfect set-up for the perfect patsy—or is that the other way around? No matter. You’re not sympathetic; after all, you don’t have to write this essay.

But since we’re here, we will try to rev up something akin to an unbroken circle of elliptical reasoning to describe the past, present and (doubtless) future foibles that this franchise—callow, conflicted and confoundingly successfui in ways that remain impervious to any type of conventional “wisdom” overlain it—will bring forth.

FIRE SALE 2: WHEN IS A SEQUEL NOT A SEQUEL?

I wish that the person down the hall would quit playing all that CSNY (that’s “Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young,” by the way, not the “Confederate States of New York” or some au courant TV show that’s somehow misplaced a vowel). There’s nothing more grating that those high whiny voices insisting that “we have all been here before.” (No, nothing—not even me.)

But that’s the general drift of the ’06 drone about the Florida Marlins, or, as Jeff Angus once said to me in his mock-turtledove tones—“Your freakin’ Fish.” (Anybody got a used barrel for sale out there?)

It’s (as the subtitle so unsubtly imparts) just like 1998 all over again, a beautiful-but-dammed (note the spelling, Mr. F!) youth movement festooned with fire hoses.

But is it really? Last time, certain members of the not-quite-canonized neo-logical analysis community were roused to an ecstasy that would have made even unabashed sex wonk Radley Metzger blush. In hindsight, the dismantling of the ’97 World Champs was disturbingly analogous to 9/11, if Al Qaeda had used busses instead of airplanes—the innocent victims were still alive, but they were forced to play baseball when most of ‘em would have been better off playing bocce or bingo.

Now, what the true believers were convinced would happen was that these wonderful young fellas, having been carefully liberated from the imperial dungeons of the overwrought and the over-budgeted, would in short order rise up the ladder of success—providing glorious proof that the scouting departments of those same over-budgeted oafs were collectively superior if an inspired low-rent looter could only collect, collate, and coddle their castoffs.

Now this wasn’t really a new idea, even if many of you still think otherwise. It’s a notion that works—sometimes. However, it takes time—more time, alas, than the neo-logicons were willing to invest in order to take credit for it as a key centerpiece of their emerging ideology. By 2000, the collection of #1 draft picks repatriated to Miami was getting close to being a break-even team, and the trumpets were still sounding as shrilly as in that overheated year of ‘98. Two years on, however, the Fish were still stuck in their barrel, and the neo-logicons moved on.

You all know what happened next (Yanks Fried By Fish!). From that point on, the new “party line” about youth movements in the neo-logical world became belatedly Clintonian in its enervatingly parsed evasion. Now, of course, the Marlins are being re-typecast as the unseemly underbelly of baseball’s ongoing Faustian bargain.

But since, in these times, history seems to exist only to tell us how to recast it in more convenient terms, and literary references are an insult to the reader’s intelligence, let’s go back to the idea of déjà vu—yes, yes, all over again. (Graham Nash, meet Yogi Berra.)

The 1998 Fish (the ones I called “Fish fillets” back then) had a pitching staff that consisted of Livan Hernandez and a bunch of mariachi musicians who’d learned how to throw by tossing tomatoes back at their audience (who only wanted their money back). The guys who wound up anchoring the 2003 World Champs weren’t from that rag-tag horn section: Burnett and Beckett (now high-priced talent on two over-budgeted-but-still-somehow-neologically-“hip” teams in the Northeast) were only gleams in the eyes of those who foresaw an apocalypse of youth in the millennial year.

Consequently, the 1998 Fish gave up 254 more runs than the 1997 team. (Another stat for those who like to—can’t help but—keep count: we’re 700+ words into this churnin’ urn of burnin’ love, and that’s our very first hard number. Too bad, I was shooting for a thousand.)

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to determine if the 2006 Fish Sticks are likely to be that lame again.

ME AND MRS. PAUL: WHAT’S IN THE FRYER FOR ‘06

Oops—that’s my mission. And there’s no backing out: no one else. Only me and Mrs. Paul, restless after being cooped up together during a long, festering winter with nothing but a dial-up Internet connection and a deep-fat fryer. (She says if her husband won’t agree to the divorce, she’s going to burn his house down for the insurance money, but I don’t believe her—and neither should you.)

The ’06 Fish have kept two young Big Fry guys—Dontrelle Willis and Miguel (please don’t call him Miggy) Cabrera. Right there, that’s more than the sum total of what the ’98 Fillets kept on hand.

Their son-of-“Fire Sale” over this off-season netted them several young pitchers who are at least closer to potential success in the big leagues than what the stork brought in ’98. While the Fish were rather well stocked with young starters from their own barrel (Jason Vargas, Josh Johnson, Scott Olsen), the gushing hole at the bottom of their barrel was due to an absence of credible relief prospects.

Did I say “relief prospects”? Let’s just say “relief pitchers” in general. The 2005 team had a terrible bullpen (4.82 ERA, next to last in the league). This was a significant reason why the Fish wound up as bottom-dwellers in September, folding and self-mutilating their way out of the wild card race. They had a decent closer (the many-spindled Todd Jones), but the rest of those guys looked like a taggle-rag of white hip-hoppers queasily mixo-lizing Olivia Newton-John covers.

In ’06, Jones is gone, and Travis Bowyer, part of the booty from the Twins in the Luis Castillo trade, looks like his replacement. The Fish have hooked a series of veteran has-beens (Kerry Ligtenberg, Joe Borowski, Matt Herges) as damage-control-in-waiting and ostensible set-up detritus, but this is probably the place where the Fish are likeliest to wind up gasping at the bottom of a waterless barrel.

Still, this will only cost them about 50 runs at worst. What’s more pivotal is exactly how much the absence of Burnett and Beckett will cost them. The simplest approach (Occam’s seat-of-the-pants twin blade in lieu of the contorted machinations of neo-logic analysis) is to figure on an extra run per nine innings for the two guys replacing B & B and the same for Willis (since even Mrs. Paul thinks his 2005 ERA was too good to be true), and a half-run per nine innings for everyone else.

That math is contorted enough, so let’s just figure that it’s 80-100 more runs allowed from the starters, and 30-50 more from the relievers. So, the worst case deep-fat damage we’re looking at is an extra 150 runs allowed.

So if the offense doesn’t change at all, and the worst case pitching scenario comes home (in a bucket, no doubt, marked “extra crispy”), that means that the Fish would win around 66 games this year.

BUT, YOU SAY…

…the offense has changed. It will be, well, offensive in the wrong way, radiating an odor similar to the one that permeates my dingy nest of perdition when Mrs. P leaves the “catch-of-the-day” in Ye Olde Fryer™ too long.

OK, it’s changed. No Delgado, nor Pierre. Nix on Castillo, sayonara to Lowell, LoDuca, Encarnacion, and whichever of those Alex Gonzalez guys they had. (Don’t bother raising your hand with the answer; it really doesn’t matter.)

What have we got instead? Right now, it looks like the Fish will try something like this:

Catcher—Miguel Olivo*, Matt Treanor*
First base—Mike Jacobs*, Wes Helms*
Second base—Dan Uggla* or Robert Andino
Shortstop—Hanley Ramirez*
Third base—Miguel Cabrera
Left field—Josh Willingham
Center field—Reggie Abercrombie*, Eric Reed
Right field—Jeremy Hermida

Asterisks (*) indicate players from outside the farm system.

This is a much better core of players than what the Fish tossed out as bait for the league back in ’98. Of that group, only Derrek Lee and Mark Kotsay turned out to be something other than minnows. True, there were a number of established big-league hitters who made enough impact on the ’98 roster to keep the team from dipping a lot offensively (the ’97 offense, like the ’03 team and last year’s, had more bark than bite), but the young hitters here (Hermida, Jacobs, Willingham, Ramirez) should form a solid top of the order with Cabrera. Of these four, Ramirez is the only possible weak link.

The big hole here is with those center fielders, but you have to bat somebody eighth (or ninth, on the days that the D-Train is on the mound).

Uggla, the Rule 5 pickup from Arizona, is also a question mark, but the Fish have other options in case he burns up in the frying pan.

All in all, the Fish may prove that you can go lean and still have some crunch (as the Kashi folks—who transformed Mrs. P from her former zaftig “muu muu purgatory” and have made her into a lean, mean deep-fat frying machine—have proven to me despite my protracted skepticism). Let’s figure they’ll lose only 30-50 runs from last year’s offense.

And since I don’t happen to think the worst-case pitching scenario will (pardon me…) pan out, I suspect that this team will avoid 100 losses. The decline will be palpable, but gentler (though not kinder…) than what the consensus of professional soothsayers and neo-logical webslingers (what—you say you can’t tell the difference between ‘em anymore?) has been imparting to you elsewhere.

This conclusion is bolstered by Bud Selig’s second greatest blight upon post-lapsarian baseball—the unbalanced schedule. The NL East really hasn’t done much to improve itself in ’06, and that may also favor the ability of the Fish to keep the barrel from draining down completely. They were 34-39 in interdivision games in ’05; keep an eye on how they do in these games early in the year.

And check how they fare against good teams at home. The ’97 and ’03 winners played over .600 ball at home against good teams (teams with a .500 WPCT or higher). The ’98 team came in at .354. If the ’06 Fish Sticks can keep this benchmark around .400, that’ll be a good confirmation of their ability to approach ~70 wins.

But by far the most important indicator is that Mrs. P, looking downright fetching in her bikini, has made no noises about moving to Miami after she torches her ex’s place for the insurance $$. If she and I stay out of Florida, then the type of disaster y’all are expecting is simply not gonna happen.

So just remember, historians: what you are condemned to repeat just might not be the same, once you actually repeat it. The Marlins are neither a franchise in peril nor a Mobius strip: they’re just a team having a good old-fashioned youth movement.

2006 ZiPS Projections - Florida Marlins

Name               P     G   AB    R    H  2B  3B  HR  RBI   BB    K  SB  CS   AVG   OBP   SLG 
Cabrera            lf  162  626  112  200  36   2  39  131   69  146   3   1  .319  .388  .570 
Hermida*           rf  127  387   68  103  18   1  15   58   59   98  15   3  .266  .371  .434 
Willingham         c   101  290   57   69  17   1  16   50   44   79   5   3  .238  .356  .469 
Wilson             c    74  212   36   54  16   0   8   31   29   54   0   0  .255  .344  .443 
Jacobs*            c   131  468   62  125  26   1  22   79   31  104   1   2  .267  .318  .468 
Stokes             1b   95  348   54   86  17   0  20   60   35  117   3   3  .247  .319  .468 
Aguila             lf  110  305   48   83  18   2   9   41   28   73   6   4  .272  .333  .433 
Helms              3b  111  335   31   88  16   1  10   46   32   86   0   1  .263  .337  .406 
Kinkade            lf  113  379   57   92  26   1   9   46   26   73   4   4  .243  .332  .388 
Seabol             3b  114  376   53   95  22   1  13   53   27   75   2   1  .253  .304  .420 
Lopez#             2b  114  401   53  105  20   4   4   37   30   61  10   8  .262  .325  .362 
Cepicky*           lf  125  432   54  107  22   2  12   58   27   97   3   1  .248  .296  .391 
Little             lf   80  266   35   62  10   3   9   34   14   76   7   5  .233  .299  .395 
Amezaga#           ss  107  347   48   94  16   2   3   34   28   59  10  10  .271  .330  .354 
Baker*             c   125  437   55  104  21   2   9   49   37  110   1   1  .238  .302  .357 
Uggla              2b  131  463   62  107  24   2  11   55   37  112  12   8  .231  .302  .363 
Treanor            c    84  231   25   50  10   0   4   23   25   47   2   2  .216  .320  .312 
Olivo              c    97  299   37   69  14   2   9   37   17   80   8   4  .231  .280  .381 
Niles#             ss  118  328   40   77  13   1   2   28   39   87   3   2  .235  .319  .299 
Molina             c   135  472   51  106  19   2  10   56   40  113   3   4  .225  .291  .337 
Ramirez#           ss  115  426   51  103  13   5   5   38   29   66  21  10  .242  .294  .331 
Abercrombie        cf  121  456   59  105  16   4  15   52   17  151  16  11  .230  .265  .382 
Wood               3b  121  398   45   87  15   1   9   43   29   85   2   2  .219  .280  .329 
Jorgensen          c    62  180   18   36   9   0   4   19   18   55   1   0  .200  .275  .317 
Reese              2b   96  288   24   63  11   1   3   25   29   70   6   1  .219  .291  .295 
Hoover             c    79  247   27   54  15   1   2   22   19   66   3   2  .219  .283  .312 
Andino             ss  140  521   53  122  19   0   4   43   31  130  16   5  .234  .280  .294 
Reed*              cf  120  456   55  112  11   3   3   33   26  105  24  17  .246  .293  .303 
El Cero Gordo*     lf   80   95    6   19   3   0   1   10    8   14   0   0  .200  .260  .263 
Garbe              cf   90  301   30   54  13   0   4   23   20   55   7   5  .179  .236  .262 

Name                 W   L    ERA   G  GS     INN    H   ER  HR   BB    K 
Willis*             18  10   3.38  33  33   216.0  204   81  13   55  166 
Resop                4   2   3.69  53   0    61.0   56   25   4   21   63 
Sanchez              7   6   3.81  23  23   118.0  105   50  13   47  137 
Bowyer               4   4   3.87  56   0    79.0   63   34   8   43   96 
Ligtenberg           4   3   3.90  53   0    60.0   57   26   7   16   55 
Borowski             3   2   4.13  48   0    48.0   45   22   5   16   40 
Vargas*              9  10   4.26  30  27   152.0  147   72  16   57  137 
Carlyle              5   5   4.32  27  15    98.0   99   47  15   24   73 
Fuell                3   3   4.34  46   0    58.0   61   28   5   19   40 
Petit                8   8   4.43  25  25   130.0  124   64  24   34  133 
Olsen*               6   6   4.54  22  21   125.0  123   63  14   52  119 
Nolasco              7   9   4.62  27  27   152.0  148   78  21   58  146 
Johnson              7   9   4.66  28  25   145.0  151   75  12   62  100 
Megrew*              5   7   4.72  20  20   103.0  101   54  10   48   85 
Bump                 2   3   4.72  42   1    61.0   65   32   6   24   38 
Mitre                7   9   4.73  31  23   139.0  139   73  15   60  113 
Rupe                 5   6   4.75  23  14    91.0   97   48  17   21   77 
Herges               2   4   4.76  63   0    68.0   73   36   8   25   46 
Moehler              7   9   4.86  31  23   139.0  162   75  15   41   77 
Kensing              5   7   4.88  22  20   120.0  135   65  13   41   75 
Fulchino             7   9   4.92  27  26   139.0  147   76  15   61   99 
Messenger            3   4   4.96  65   0    78.0   75   43   9   43   67 
van Hekken*          6  11   4.98  29  28   168.0  186   93  23   55   97 
Ungs                 6   8   5.08  23  23   124.0  139   70  20   37   83 
Pinto*               7  11   5.10  28  27   143.0  129   81  13   98  147 
George*              6  11   5.39  31  23   147.0  157   88  23   64  100 
Cave                 2   5   5.94  44   0    47.0   51   31   6   30   35 
Allison              2   7   6.37  17  17    89.0  104   63  18   46   67 

Disclaimer:  ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance.  
Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors - 
many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2006.  
ZiPS is projecting equivalent production - a .240 ZiPS projection may end up 
being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example.  Whether or not a player will play 
is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting 
the future.