The Marlins Have Something to Avoid

I realize that I can be a little too often drawn to bests and worsts. It happens because I’m lazy, but it also happens because those make for easy subjects to sell. I don’t need to convince you that the best of something is interesting. Same goes for the opposite. I’m just the messenger, providing exceptional fun facts. Baseball creates the fun facts. I just go and find them.

I have another fun fact to share with you. I have another potential historical worst. Several weeks ago, the Marlins were worth watching, because they were making an improbable surge into the wild-card race. The surge ended as abruptly as it started, and now the Marlins are just playing out the string. There are still players of significance, sure. Fans are still watching to see if Giancarlo Stanton will go yard. But let me give you a statistic to keep your eye on. Want a reason to pay attention to the Marlins’ final stretch? They could badly use some pitcher-hits. Otherwise they’re going to set a new low.

Pitcher plate appearances are seldom taken seriously. I mean, the pitchers themselves are trying, and they all, to a man, love to swing and reach base, but it’s regarded as almost pure, stakes-free entertainment. Pitcher plate appearances are caught somewhere in between baseball as a show and baseball as big business. Front offices don’t go out of their way to acquire good-hitting pitchers. Pitcher batting practice is seldom a priority. You just about never hear fans talk about how their pitchers are collectively the best or the worst at the plate. The expectations are set at zero. And yet, pitcher plate appearances do matter. They matter as much as any others. When pitchers come up, the at-bats all count just the same. If a runner is stranded, he doesn’t get to come around later. Pitcher-hitting both matters and it doesn’t. But it does. The Marlins have been bad at it.

How bad? This bad. Here are the worst pitcher-hitting seasons in the integration era, by wRC+. I’ve excluded American League teams who haven’t batted often enough to count for anything.

There are this year’s Marlins, in dead last. It wouldn’t take much to move them out of dead last, but the time remaining is limited, and they simply might not have the skill. The Marlins could have the worst-hitting pitching staff in modern baseball. Let me support the above table with another. You’d be correct if you pointed out that pitchers have gotten worse and worse at hitting over time. So, while the Marlins pitchers have been bad, perhaps they haven’t been that bad, compared to the league average for pitchers? Not so. Baseball Reference has a split, called sOPS+. It’s like split-specific OPS+, which works like wRC+. Here’s the new bottom 10.

It’s close, but we’re still looking at the Marlins. Even relative to the year-specific average pitcher, these Marlins have been the worst in at least several decades. If the Marlins want to avoid setting a new mark, they could use some hits. Or walks. Or a dinger. Anything. Anything, but another torrent of outs.

This season, among National League teams, the Marlins are, obviously, last in wRC+. They have the highest team ground-ball rate, and they have the highest team strikeout rate. So, to go along with their terrible actual performance, the Marlins also rank dead last in expected wOBA. They’ve deserved the results they’ve gotten. Their pitchers have run a .105 OBP; the next-worst in recent history is .118. And these Marlins have no home runs, and no triples. They have one double.

Here is that double!

That ball was solidly struck. It was also very nearly caught by Scott Schebler, but, we needn’t be picky. Jose Urena, there, went the other way with a quality line drive, and he’s had a few other instances this year of strong contact. In a game in San Francisco, he sent a ball to the track in left-center. Grading against the curve of pitcher standards, Urena, to the eye, kind of looks like he knows what he’s doing. He’s also struck out almost literally half the time.

Urena is second among Marlins pitchers in plate appearances. Dan Straily is first. Straily is also responsible for the most recent pitcher-hit. Here’s what it looked like.

A hit is a hit, even when it just gets through the Mets’ middle infield, but that’s the baseball swing equivalent of nudging your partner awake from a nap. Straily has struck out more than half the time. Now, Straily is first in plate appearances, and Urena is second. Adam Conley is third. Here’s Adam Conley swinging.

The one thing you can give Conley is appreciation for how he demonstrated that it’s easy to make contact for contact’s sake. As long as you don’t care what the ball actually does, you can sometimes put a major-league in play. Nevertheless, Conley has also struck out almost half the time. As it happens, he drew the most recent walk drawn by any Marlins pitcher, almost a month ago. It came on a full-count pitch by Travis Wood.

Conley didn’t…know…what to do. After ball four, you’re not supposed to hesitate. The charitable explanation is that Conley just might not have realized he’d seen four balls. But, look at Dee Gordon standing on deck. He had to tell Adam Conley to go.

Probably the best-hitting pitcher on staff is Edinson Volquez. His season ended the first week of July. It’s because of Volquez the Marlins’ pitcher-hitting season began 2-for-2, with two singles off Stephen Strasburg. Since then, they’ve hit a combined .081. Vance Worley is fifth among Marlins pitchers in plate appearances. This is a screenshot of him hitting a single. I didn’t seek this out. Believe it or not, this screenshot found its way to me.

I want you to remember that, as a group, Marlins pitchers have struck out almost half the time they’ve come up. That is very, exceptionally bad, even by pitcher standards. And the contact has also been terrible. This is how you end up with maybe the worst hitting staff ever. I looked at the Marlins pitchers’ average exit velocities and launch angles. I’ve identified an “average” Marlins pitcher ball in play. Here’s what it looks like. It’s off the bat of Dee Gordon.

That’s how the average ball in play has looked. And they’ve also struggled more than anyone else to hit balls in play in the first place. It’s only fitting — of all the pitchers currently on active rosters, who’ve batted at least 50 times in their careers, the Marlins roster has four of the nine worst by wRC+. Amazingly, this has all happened mostly without Wei-Yin Chen, who last year batted 49 times and ended with a line of .000/.000/.000. Chen missed the bulk of this year with arm problems. It’s possible the team numbers could’ve looked even worse.

At the plate, the Marlins pitchers’ best month this year was April, when they had a wRC+ of -20. In July, they combined for a strikeout rate of 52%, which is the second-worst month for any pitching staff. The only month worse? The Marlins’ September, during which they’ve combined for a strikeout rate of 66%. Their wRC+ has been -61. So if they’re doing anything, they’re trending in the direction of history. The Marlins still have time to avoid setting a new mark. All they’d need is a handful of baserunners. And yet, as the schedule has approached its conclusion, Marlins pitchers have stopped hitting the ball at all. This could be a matter of fate.