A New Endeavor

Hello.

...these new introductions always make me so uncomfortable.


...that's probably why I'm so savagely bad with women.


...Ahem.


So I've undertaken this endeavor for a few reasons, listed as follows:

1) I love the Marlins. I've been a Marlins fan since I hopped on their bandwagon in 1997, and I haven't hopped off since. That's actually a lie; I hopped off for the season (I stress this because I was going to come right back on the following year, as I felt they were going to compete then as well, but couldn't bear to see my team suffer at the hands of Mark Prior) at around the top of the 8th inning, Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS, a soul-crushing evening for Cubs fans everywhere, but an evening which I doubt many recall fondly because so few people are Marlins fans. It was magical for me when I turned the TV back on as Luis Castillo hit the foul ball that started the chain reaction that was that inning.

Otherwise, I've stayed with them through the years, enjoying 2006 and 2008, and looking forward to what was a promising (and still could be) 2009.

2) I love baseball. I got into it then and just now have started wising up to the finer points of the sport. I tore away from the BA/HR/RBI convention entirely last year, and I'm proud to say that I don't know who led the Marlins in RBI's in 2008, an accomplishment I owe more to my downgrading of the status of the stat than to my ignorance of the team.

...if I had to guess, Jorge Cantu? I'm not looking it up.

I can however say that the team's highest SLG and OPS belonged to Hanley Ramirez (not that that was a difficult guess) and that while this isn't the biggest step forward in my growing quest to grasp the wealth of Saber-knowledge available, it's certainly a start. I've begun looking into various Wins calculations and currently prefer the convention used on Fangraphs, a site which I'll be referencing often times here.

Does that qualify me as any sort of expert? I wouldn't begin to claim it. But having some of this statistical knowledge has helped me appreciate the game and my team more (or less, depending on their performance). I'll definitely take that.