The Marlins lost 100 games last year, and there’s no way around it: that’s a terrible season. It’s the low point to date of a slide that started after an 87-75 2009, dropping to 82, 90, and 93 losses before hitting the century mark last year, and that’s embarrassing even if we’re just sticking to the on-the-field miscues, rather than also including the continued tragicomedy that is the ownership of Jeffrey Loria. Were it not for the teardown of the Houston Astros, the Marlins would be the worst team in baseball.

But even then, it was easy to argue that it wasn’t entirely a lost season. The atrocious optics of last winter’s massive deal with Toronto gave way to a quiet appreciation that the move actually made a good amount of baseball sense, and of course they saw Jose Fernandez go from “highly touted prospect” to “Rookie of the Year and arguable Cy Young winner in a world without Clayton Kershaw.” I tried to make the case at ESPN last summer that the considerable amount of young talent the organization was accumulating could have them poised to make one of their once-a-decade runs, and my pal Marc Normandin did much the same at Sports on Earth in September.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Miami Marlins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cleveland / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / San Diego / St. Louis.

Batters
Last year’s ZiPS WAR projection for very strong outfielder Giancarlo Stanton was quite high (6.4, precisely) for someone so young. This year’s ZiPS WAR projection is also quite high (4.2, in this case) for someone so young, but also likely to be regarded as a disappointment relative to last year’s figure. The primary reason for the decline — namely, Stanton’s 500 most recent plate appearances — isn’t a mystery. Still, given the choice, one prefers a more, and not less, productive Giancarlo Stanton, probably.

Elsewhere around the diamond, one finds that the Marlins aren’t without talent. In fact, a glut of promising outfielders means that one from the triumvirate of Jake Marisnick, Marcell Ozuna, and Christian Yelich will likely be without a starting job at the beginning of the season. None of that group project to be stars in 2014, but all three are both (a) projected to be worth at least a win and also (b) either 23 years old or younger.

Finally, I’ll note — primarily because he’s a learned gentleman — that Ed Lucas is likely also to play some part in the Marlins infield, even if ZiPS isn’t entirely enthusiastic about what he’ll do there.

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Logan Morrison came up with glove, power and patience and a big twitter presence. It was exciting. Then he was injured, the power waned, and he used that twitter account to upset his franchise. Now he’s a Mariner, traded for Carter Capps. And all of this means something for the Mets and Ike Davis.

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Ryan Webb was one last week’s more surprising non-tenders. Miami decided Webb wasn’t worth his projected $1.5 million salary, according to Matt Swartz’s arbitration projections. In the past two seasons, Webb was worth 1.2 wins for the Marlins while working in 131 games. But don’t feel bad for Webb. He didn’t stay unemployed long: Baltimore added the reliever on a two-year deal for $4.5 million.

The team reportedly liked how Webb’s ground-ball skills compared to the freshly-traded Jim Johnson, and acknowledged Webb’s career splits while also noting he made improvements in that department this past season. Pitchers can change the type of pitcher they are, such as Edward Mujica’s transition from an extreme fly-ball pitcher to a heavy ground-ball pitcher. But how does a pitcher  improve his ability to get out opposite-handed batters without adding a pitch?

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I imagine that, for a front office exec, there’s nothing quite like the buzz you get from picking up another team’s non-tender and getting value from that player. Maybe it’s just ‘one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,’ but in a business where one sector of the market has to continually work to find value in surprising places, it’s an important moment.

But is there much success to be found in the bargain bin? These are players that their own team has given up on — and we have some evidence that teams know more about their own players than the rest of the league, and that players that are re-signed are more successful. What can we learn from the successes and failures that we’ve seen in the past?

To answer that question, I loaded all the non-tendered players since 2007 into a database and looked at their pre- and post-non-tender numbers.

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Episode 402
Nathaniel Stoltz is a very thoughtful prospect writer for FanGraphs et al. He’s also the guest on this terribly pleasant edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 48 min play time.)

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The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

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The polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet has published today his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Miami Marlins.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Marlins or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

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Austin Brice is a legitimate prospect. The Marlins spent $205,000 to sign him out of high school in 2010, and he was ranked as the sixteenth-best farmhand in the Miami organization by Baseball America coming into the 2013 season, an area of prospect lists he will likely to continue to reside in this offseason. He’s just 21, has two pitches that flash plus, and has a prototypical pitcher’s body and smooth, easy, delivery.

He also has 190 career walks in 279 2/3 professional innings, including 82 in 113 frames in 2013. That’s a career 14.88% walk rate and a 15.16% mark in 2013, a number that was actually a step back from 2012 (14.08%) even though he was repeating the Low-A level (his ERA also shot up from 4.35 to 5.73, and his K-rate fell from 25.26% to 20.52%. Certainly, this past season did not bring the young righthander much good news.

Plenty of pitching prospects pair tantalizing stuff with frustrating inabilities to throw strikes, but Brice (whom I saw five different times in 2013, a virtue of living 45 minutes from NewBridge Bank Park) is an especially frustrating case because, as I said above, his delivery is one of his strengths. In this piece, I’m going to examine the root of his control problems and tie it to some more general and important lessons about the process behind throwing strikes.

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