Fish Bites

Running on mostly Mountain Dew and 45-60 minutes of sleep for the last day and a half, we begin pounding through today's late afternoon/early evening Bites!

- I was pleasantly surprised to find this interesting Marlins blog and, in particular, this interesting piece by Ryan Colburn on Marlins batting orders, the LaRussa way!

So, here’s why the move makes sense from a logic standpoint: While the pitcher may be the least effective offensive “force” in the lineup, and therefore should garner the fewest at bats, the pitcher is often pinch-hit for, therefore skewing the numbers. For example, Marlins pitchers this year have an On-Base Percentage of .129 and a Slugging Percentage of .118, obviously both of these are quite terrible. However, the 9th spot (which includes pinch-hitters) puts up a .226/.205 line, weighted predominantly by the pitchers’ lines.

Under the lineup of: Chris Coghlan, Emilio Bonifacio, Hanley Ramirez, Jorge Cantu, Dan Uggla, Jeremy Hermida, Cody Ross, John Baker and the Pitcher, the Marlins are projected to score roughly 4.5 runs a game over the course of a 162 game season.

However, the “proposed” lineup sits somewhere in the middle, in terms of order, as: Chris Coghlan, John Baker, Hanley Ramirez, Jorge Cantu, Dan Uggla, Jeremy Hermida, Cody Ross, Pitcher, Bonifacio would net roughly 4.7 runs/game, making it surprisingly close to ideal.

This was all done using Baseball Musings' awesome Lineup Analysis tool, in case you were wondering.

Now I ran the numbers myself and was surprised to find the following values, all using the 1999-2002 model:

The current lineup: 4.547 runs/game
The sensible lineup, flip-flopping Bonifacio and Baker: 4.646 runs/game
The LaRussa lineup, flip-flopping Bonifacio and the pitcher: 4.709 runs/game.

The difference between the current lineup and the sensible one is worth a modest 16 runs over 162 games, but the difference between the current and LaRussa lineups was calculated at a 26 runs in 162 games. But there's more fun to be had with this a little later.

- It seems Wachovia, the bank lending a large sum of credit towards paying for the Marlins' new stadium, wants some of that money now. Apparently they're demanding they get their fees paid to them before any money goes out towards other services in the building of the stadium. As a result, it looks like Miami-Dade county commissioners will have to make yet another vote on the issue, along with pushing the final pullout deadline to July 15th from July 1st. Delays, delays, as if this stadium business hasn't had enough of it. It's already bad enough the team sleazed its way into this mostly publicly-funded park, now we can't even get it underway without more problems from the parties involved.

- Slow Marlins news day, so I've got some other links for you. Eric Seidman has an excellent take on Matt Cain's performance, but be forewarned, lest ye be too quick with regression from BABIP.

- Also, a good post at Beyond the Box Score about Cap'n Jetes vs. A-Rod in the playoffs. You'd think it'd be no competition...and it really isn't, though jhmoore does mention that A-Rod has significantly fewer PA's in the playoffs than Jeter's ridiculous 549.