Marlins progressing

At 4-10, the Marlins do not seem to be doing very well in the early going of this new season, but that is not entirely the case. Let's focus on run production, which is the name of the game.

Through 14 games this season, the Marlins have scored 67 runs. That is 4.79 per contest. That actually puts the Marlins at 28th in total runs scored, but in terms of at bats, the Marlins rank 29th with only 477 ABs.

That is because they have only played 14 games to this point, whereas the Reds, the leaders in runs scored at 107, have played 16 - which figures to be 6.68 runs per game. (To offer some perspective here, the Marlins just took one game from the Reds in that three game series, but also blew a game which could have given them the series. They lost 1-9, but won 12-6 and lost again 8-9 - scoring a total of 21 runs to 24 given up.)

That means, the leaders in runs scored, the Reds, are getting a run 19% of the tame they get up to bat (Rs/ABs). The young Marlins? They swim at 14%.

So, in comparison to the league leader, the Marlins have a little ways to go, but they are treading water right near the middle. Considering that most of these players are in their first year (Uggla, Ramirez, Abercrombie, Reed) and others are getting their first full time duty with the club (Willingham, Hermida, Jacobs), that is not too bad.

But more importantly, how does this year's club compare to last year's club?

They are better.

Last year's Marlins scored 717 runs in 5502 at bats, or at a 13% rate. This year's Marlins, although it is early, are scoring at 14%.

Based on that percentage, if the Marlins get 5502 at bats this season, the Marlins will score 770 runs this season. That is a figure that is up by 53 runs total.

Now, it is still very early in the season. Yet, this could be a good thing - the Marlins have already had 2 games where they posted double digit runs, and they have the potential to do it much more often than experts may believe. Hanley Ramirez is showing off all his tools, while this young season has already been hampered by an injury to big time prospect, Jeremy Hermida.

Not to mention, Joe Girardi is doing the manger thing for the first time and is still trying to figure out the roster and the best lineup for this club. It seems that Uggla is the missing piece for the #2 spot, as he continues to put the ball in play and displays pretty good power. Miguel is starting to hit again, but is still having some bad at bats. Willingham has been excellent whereas Jacobs can only seem to hit home runs. The race for CF is on, with Aguila having the most experience but Abercrombie has the most sizzle of anyone out there.

There is plenty of potential that could lead to this Marlins unit becoming a more cohesive, offensive machine. If they can manage to work out the kinks and endure through the growing pains, this offense may turn things around - and in a hurry.

Something familiar this way comes

A reunion with ex-Marlins resurrects some proper perspectives about the Marlins franchise

In November of 2005, Carlos Delgado was shipped off to the New York Mets. It was a deal that seemed to be made out of necessity, as the Marlins brass kept using the term 'market correction' in their rhetoric when discussing the move. And the possibility of future moves were painted in this light.

The media, as typical when regarding the Marlins, decided to smirk at this particular phrase, pointing out that the Marlins franchise have this sort of thing in their history, in their blood.

What they forgot to mention is that in the '97 meltdown and fire sale, it was a different regime and a different owner that was calling the shots. Dave Dombrowski, then Marlins GM (and now GM for the Detroit Tigers), was forced to do it by his owner Wayne Huizenga - who continued on the path for the fire sale despite a heart felt plea from players Al Leiter, Moises Alou, and even Alex Fernandez to re-structure their contracts to keep the championship team together.

Loria and his bunch tried their best after the '03 season and continued to keep as much of the core in-tact as they could, given their revenue constraints, for the next two seasons.

Then reality set in.

So Delgado was gone; Lowell, Beckett, Lo Duca, Encarnacion. Mota. Todd Jones. AJ Burnett (was he ever really here to begin with?). The list goes on.

There is an interesting quote from Paul Lo Duca that not only supports the current Marlins front office, but is sympathetic to their cause.

"I know Jeffrey didn't want to do this, he's a great person and a fan of the game, too. It's just something where you don't get a stadium, you're losing a lot of money, and it's a decision he had to make. He couldn't avoid it. The organization is taking too much heat for it. It's really a stadium issue. If they had a stadium, we'd still have the same team."

This quote was taken from the Miami Herald. Which is amazing considering that the Herald has seemed to turn a blind eye whenever discussing anything related to the Marlins' plea for a stadium.

Nevertheless, it is striking that Paul Lo Duca (at least according to a reader of the Herald and Sun-Sentinel may be concerned) is so supportive of the Marlins front office and what they had to do. Not just what they chose to do.

So it is that tonight, the new Marlins will face the Mets - who have several old Marlins on their roster. Ramon Castro, Paul Lo Duca, Carlos Delgado, Cliff Floyd. Castro was a member of that '03 championship team. In fact, it was Castro that was supposed to be the replacement for Pudge once he left for the money in Detroit. That didn't work out and Lo Duca was later traded for to help patch that void. And Delgado was essentially Derek Lee's replacement - after Lee was let go following the championship season of '03 since the Marlins didn't have enough money to re-sign the entire team and keep them in place. Now, the Marlins couldn't afford to keep Delgado either.

Yet, it is Cliff Floyd that can probably relate some to this new crop of Marlins - being that he was on that championship '97 team and stayed behind to help rebuild with that '98 team. The embarassment of being called the World Champions and still managing to lose 101 games.

So, there is a lot of issues and memories that can be stirred up here with tonight's meeting. A lot of similarities in the sense that some things, at least for the Marlins, never seem to change.

Here's hoping to change. May the Marlins finally start to get things right and get the means to do so. That is the wish, it seems, even of their former players.

And let's start by beating the stinkin' Mets!

Amid good baseball, message for Marlins continues to be negative

The Marlins leave Houston with a 1-2 start to the season - which could just as easily be 3-0 if they had scored only a few more runs. Or used the amount of runs they scored (16) in a more sparing way.

And their young players are playing very tough baseball - Girardi called last night's loss the best game of the season (so far) the Marlins played. They came back from a 6-0 deficit to make a stand in the 9th where Hermida and Cabrera both fought back from 0-2 counts to give their team a shot. Willingham's broken bat squib out was the final out of the game and the last chance for the night. But it took Lidge - one of the best closers in baseball - a 28 pitch inning to get the job done.

There is no quit in the Marlins.

Despite this, the media has seemed to choose a negative stance with the Marlins - at least for the most part. Most pundits pick the Marlins to lose upwards of 100 games, choosing to overlook their talent in favor of experience. The same mistake was made in 2003 when no one picked the Marlins to go to the World Series (except yours truly...) and certainly when they got there, no one picked them to win anything at all.

Experience = wins? No, talent gives you the best opportunity to win games. And the Marlins have loads of it.

But it isn't just about the on-field product the media seems to be attacking, but the Marlins front office and their off-field activities.

The Marlins meet with San Antonio's mayor and staff on Opening Day in Houston and the media blasts them for it. Sure, this was not exactly tactful - they could have waited until the second game of the season at least - but the Marlins front office have an obligation to the franchise to secure its future, too.

And the South Florida media - by and large - neglects to be helpful at all in this process. Instead, they choose to bad mouth the Marlins. From characterizations of David Samson as some kind of annoying, inept pipsqueak (and admittedly, he does look suspiciously like a Big Boy statue come to life...), to Loria being cheap with some kind of hidden agenda to drive the Marlins franchise into the ground (whoops, winning a World Series in 2003 and re-investing money into the team's payroll for the next 2 seasons seems to be just a fit).

It was Dan Le Batard's now infamous bash of the Marlins in 2003 when they signed Ivan Rodriguez that serves as the perfect illustration for how the media has portrayed and viewed South Florida's professional baseball franchise.

Disturbingly, Le Batard likened it to putting 'breast implants on a rotting corpse'.

If that doesn't ring of the greatest optimism, it is certainly extremely more satisfying that the biggest plate of crow had to be served up to Le Batard to partake of. Not to mention a huge 'I told you so' about 100 stories high.

Mea culpa? Don't offend our Latin audience with such a trite gesture.

Hyde wrote an article spelling out why it would be more beneficial for the Marlins to trade Dontrelle Willis. He published it on Opening Day, 2006.

David J. Neal, who was more known for covering hockey for the Herald, has attempted to write about the Marlins on a couple of occasions. The most recent was a very negative look to the team's immediate future and was published on March 31st. Click Here to see the article.

The media in South Florida has been historically unkind to the Marlins - ever since their savior Wayne Huizenga decided to nuke the team only 2 weeks after winning the World Series in 1997. Unlike H-bomb's fat $2 million tax exemption, the media (unlike the government) decided to attach the actions to the franchise and not the person responsible.

No in-depth investigative report on Huizenga's claims of $20 million losses came down the pike. No real substantial questioning of Huizenga's agenda came into place. Instead, the media decided to bash the fans - who were only hesitant to come back to the game since suffering from a strike only 3 seasons prior (in 1994) and were only in the infantile stages of having a major league franchise that was just hatched in 1993.

Even Huizenga was pushing for a new ball-park in those days, remember Blockbuster park?

So ask yourselves, why is it still, now, when the situation hasn't changed for the Marlins - only the franchise owners have - that the media instead bashes the franchise or the fans and not look at the real problem? (Like, I don't know, the lease that was signed by Huizenga and John Henry - then owner of the Marlins who didn't have the money to build a new stadium for the Marlins, but somehow could sling the bread together to buy the Red Sox franchise - a lease that should be reported as some sort of criminal lease which shackles the tenet)

This is not to say that criticism is not due for the Marlins franchise. But criticism without an agenda would be welcomed. Has Larry Beinfest made some questionable trades? Yes. Not every trade is going to work out though, right Mr. Billy Koch?

Things must maintain proper perspective. The Marlins are cash-strapped and even if they sold out every game this season, they still wouldn't generate the revenue that they would need to run this franchise as, I am sure, Mr. Loria would like. That said, I don't want to see the Marlins run cheaply like the Kansas City Royals or Pittsburgh Pirates. These franchises, due to the revenue sharing structure and economics of MLB, have no incentive to be winning teams but instead to be run as cheaply as possibly so that they can keep getting that slice of the pie for being on the bottom rung of MLB's economic scale.

They want to get fat off the fat of the MLB's properly run franchises. And that isn't right - but that is where the game is now with Bud Selig.

Still, the Marlins deserve better. They deserve help to get a stadium built. They deserve the respect that a franchise who has brought them 2 world championships should get. The community deserves to have a tradition that is home grown, right here in South Florida, that is about winning baseball and a team that they can be proud of.

Let's hope, as fans, that the media starts to realize its own wrongs and its responsibility to its community, too. Let's hope that they embrace this team and help others to do the same. This is the only hope for the Marlins franchise and its fans for a future at all.

Marlins Open season with loss, but hope

The final score smiled 1-0 in favor of the hometown Astros, which subsequently started the Marlins season off with their first loss and officially started off Joe Girardi's managing career.

The first of many losses? That is what most of the pundits out there would have you believe.

But don't believe it.

The Marlins are young and inexperienced, and sure, they are fielding 6 rookies in their starting lineup - a modern day baseball record.

But don't bet against them either.

Blasting out of spring training with the best winning percentage is not enough, to be sure. Because, it doesn't count.

Yet, it does count for something - hope.

The young Marlins played very hard today and if not for a couple of errors on the field, and a couple of mis-timed swings, who knows how this game could have turned out. Dontrelle Willis battled with Roy Oswalt in a pitching duel that called for pure guts. Like two tomcats, each pitcher matched the other blow for blow. A couple of botched defensive plays by slick-fielding, yet still green, Hanley Ramirez may have sealed Willis' early exit.

Willis' pitch count was getting high - 107 pitches in just 5 innings. And Girardi did something most Marlin fans SHOULD be excited about - he pulled his starter.

Why is this significant? It marks a huge paradigm shift from the McKeon days of bludgeoning players towards a more scientific approach that Girardi and his staff champion.

Some may second guess Girardi for making the switch, but the young bullpen kept the Marlins in the game following with Josh Johnson - who gave up the game's only run, Joe Borowski (ok, not young at all...), and Carlos Martinez (who has some electric stuff out there). The pitching staff was able to keep this game close, but Oswalt was not having any of it and continued to go after the Marlins young hitters.

Still, the Marlins battled and created a few opportunities to score, but in the end it was just not good enough. They were not as fortunate as the Astros whose only score came on a slider that got away from Miguel Olivo. But they battled, and watching Jacobs, Hermida, Cabrera and Willingham at the plate made one feel that something was going to happen. You can feel that even though this team is young, they can play and they were never out of it.

They are well coached. They have loads of talent. But they got the loss. Still, there is hope - another 161 games to go. Who knows what the season holds in store for this team. Perhaps a miracle? Perhaps.