OT: Why were the Marlins so bad last season?

[Mad-Eye Moody]

Someone brought up a good point in the trade thread. The Marlins were a terrible team last season. And you should always be cautious about adding 3 "stars" from such a bad team.

So the question is...why were they so bad? the main players the Jays got (Johnson, Buehrle, Reyes) all had pretty good years for the Marlins.

The Marlins rotation last year to start the season: Johnson/Sanchez/Buehrle/Nolasco/Zambrano.

Their offense:

Jose Reyes
Hanley Ramirez
Mike Stanton
Logan Morisson
Omar Infante
Emilio Bonifacio
John Buck
Gaby Sanchez

So where did it go wrong?

[YogiStewart]

start off with their clown of a manager. he set the tempo.

[jaymeister15]

Not sure, didn't pay much attention to them last year...but I don't think it is much of an issue at all. Baseball is such an individual sport and isn't like basketball where you have more of an argument for the whole putting up stats on a bad team thing (which I don't really buy there either).

[Lateral Quicks]

It's a good question, one that I don't know enough to answer. On paper it certainly looked like a better team. They did trade some of their better players during the season, so I'd imagine their final record was worse than it otherwise would have been.

[JN]

They gave up on their team really quickly -- it's almost as if Loria planned it that way (look at the structure of the contracts that for the most part had much lower first years). Take away a few unlucky breaks and that 2012 opening day team could have been a 90 win team in 2013

[RapsFanInVA]

They had a hot streak, then everything fell apart. Lots of it was Taco Bell. It was unbelievable how many games he blew late. My favorite was when he came in with a 6-2 and blew it. It wasn't even a save situation so he didn't get a blown save lol. Too many demoralizing losses + Ozzie praising Castro and pissing off his players with stupid broken English sayings like "It's time to put our dicks in the ground" and his countless rants rubbed a lot of guys the wrong way.

[dagger]

Not withstanding their record, almost every major league team has a few nice assets. The Jays weren't very good, but Encarnacion and Morrow had career years, as did Casey Janssen. It's not hard to imagine MLB teams that would consider a trade for that trio to be a game-changer, too.

[The_Hater]

Someone brought up a good point in the trade thread. The Marlins were a terrible team last season. And you should always be cautious about adding 3 "stars" from such a bad team.

It's one thing not to like these 3 players but your reasoning on why, is terrible.

It's baseball, 25 players on every roster and every single team has both good players and bad players and you need a lot of good players to have a winning team, not just 4 or 5. This isn't like basketball, in baseball your best hitter gets (approx) 1/9th of the at bats and your best pitcher only plays every fifth day.

Look at this team: http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/SEA/1998.shtml

3 surefire hall-of-famers all healthy, productive and in their prime plus a few more players that were all-stars. Somehow they won only 76 games. That's baseball.

[Parataxis]

Wow, I havn't thought about Glenallen Hill since I was a kid.

[Mad-Eye Moody]

Someone brought up a good point in the trade thread. The Marlins were a terrible team last season. And you should always be cautious about adding 3 "stars" from such a bad team.

It's one thing not to like these 3 players but your reasoning on why, is terrible.

It's baseball, 25 players on every roster and every single team has both good players and bad players and you need a lot of good players to have a winning team, not just 4 or 5. This isn't like basketball, in baseball your best hitter gets (approx) 1/9th of the at bats and your best pitcher only plays every fifth day.

Look at this team: http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/SEA/1998.shtml

3 surefire hall-of-famers all healthy, productive and in their prime plus a few more players that were all-stars. Somehow they won only 76 games. That's baseball.

I realize bad teams can have good players. You're talking to a Toronto sports fan here. Still, Miami was terrible last season and I'm not going to blame it all on Ozzie (though I agree he deserves a lot of the blame).

[Kaizen]

Stanton's reaction to Harper.

Giancarlo Stanton ‏@Giancarlo818
@Bharper3407 Dang bro, If only my last name backwards wasn't NotNats!

[JMH]

Stanton's reaction to Harper.

Giancarlo Stanton ‏@Giancarlo818
@Bharper3407 Dang bro, If only my last name backwards wasn't NotNats!

Possibly one of the best tweets I've seen.

Kudo's to him.

[TheMainEvent]

One of the biggest reasons: Heath Bell.
That dude's numbers were SO inflated in San Diego, he never deserved that contract he received from Miami. Considering how frustrated many Jays fans were at Frank Francisco two seasons ago and Sergio Santos/Francisco Cordero this past season, I'd imagine if Heath Bell were in Toronto and had played the way he did, there'd be some Jays fans that would actually try to kill him. He was worse than Cordero, except because of his contract he managed to stay closer for maybe half the season. I believe the Marlins were third in the league in total blown saves.

Josh Johnson, coming back from surgery, didn't play that well for a large portion of the season. If he had played like his all-star years, the Jays would've had to give up D'Arnaud, Lawrie, etc. this past week to get him. Despite that, he was still probably their best pitcher last season. Buerhle was steady but unspectacular.

Also, as far as I can tell, they had absolutely nobody to hit homeruns except for Stanton. If I remember correctly, they had to hit Jose Reyes THIRD for a portion of the season because they had no other hitters, using Stanton at fourth. Hanley Ramirez was around at the beginning, but he wasn't playing that well and was then shipped off halfway into the season.

Their roster just wasn't very good overall. They didn't have enough quality hitters, they didn't have enough quality pitchers (starting and relief). Their WHOLE lineup was basically just Stanton, with a returning-from-injury Johnson and a slightly-washed-up Ramirez before last offseason. They had this allusion of potential because they added Jose Reyes, Mark Buerhle, and Heath Bell... but that's still not nearly enough to make a good team.

Also, Ozzie was a clown. I still think he's a quality manager, but his mouth is such a distraction to the team. It's not too dissimilar to Valentine in Boston, except I question his quality as a manager too.

[TheMainEvent]

Oh, and I see this argument a bit on here and on some other sites: how good can the Jays be if they're getting players from such a horrible team.

It's not as if the Jays are switching rosters. If they were switching and/or replacing, then yes, the argument can make sense. But they aren't replacing Bautista, Encarnacion, Morrow, Lawrie, etc. with Reyes, Johnson, and Buerhle... they're ADDING them.

It'd be as if the Jays didn't make this trade but instead traded Baustista and Encarnacion to another team for prospects. If some of their fans said: "They're coming from a losing team, they can't be that good." I'm sure you'd be shaking your head. A good player is a good player.

[Skin Blues]

Wow, I havn't thought about Glenallen Hill since I was a kid.

And Rob Ducey! And Paul Spoljaric!

True stories:

- last month I was in a barn that sells antiques and saw a signed Rob Ducey baseball for sale

- In 1996 Paul Spoljaric threw out a boxed CD-ROM about the Blue Jays called "Catch This!" into the stands at the SkyDome. And I caught it.

That's about the most pertinent information in this thread so far.