And Away We Go

The 2009 baseball season is now one week old. With one week in the books I figured I'd comment on some of the things I witnessed this week.

Fact or Fiction????-Today's installment deals with the Florida Marlins. The Fish are now 5-1 after taking 2 out of 3 from the Mets. I can just see it coming, at some point soon someone in the media will compare this team to the other team that plays here in Florida. So I may as well do it now. Last season the Rays proved you can greatly improve if you have two things. 1.Starting Pitching and 2..Very good team defense. As for the Marlins starters this group is for real. Nolasco. Johnson, Volstad and Sanchez have the potential to rival any teams top 4 starters. Josh Johnson today was simply outstanding. And you can make the argument that Ricky Nolasco was the second best pitcher in the second half of last season. There is no questioning any of these guys stuff. The potential pitfall comes from Johnson and Sanchez coming off major surgery's. As of now they both look as good or better than before the operations. Another potential red flag will be just how many innings these young studs can give the Fish. The max innings Josh Johnson ever threw in one season was 157 and Anibal Sanchez only went 114 innings. I've got to believe Fredi Gonzalez will be very careful with these guys. Which brings us to Florida's bullpen. This group won't scare too many people. Matt Lindstrom throws very hard but only seems to have that one pitch. When he gets a secondary pitch he could be lights out but he isn't quite there yet. The rest of the pen has guys like Kiko Calero, Leo Nunez and Dan Meyer. In Friday nights game Sanchez was fantastic giving up no runs over five innings. He was dominating a very good Met lineup. Then the bullpen gave up the lead twice including a run in the top of the 9th before they pulled it out in the bottom of the 9th. I fear this may be a pattern. As for the defense it should be improved from last season. Last season they were 2nd in the NL in most errors. With Jorge Cantu at first and Jeremy Hermeida moving to left it should upgrade the defense. In addition Cameron Maybin will cover alot of ground. But they are nowhere close to Tampa's defense. When I did my predictions I gave Florida third place and about 85 wins. After watching them this weekend I think that's about right.

Something also occurred in Friday nights Met-Marlin game I found very interesting. The Mets trailing by one in the 8th brought in JJ Putz to pitch. I applauded the move. The logic being if JJ can keep it a one run game than hopefully the bats could get at least one. As it happened the Mets tied up the game. So with a tie game in the bottom of the ninth I was hoping Jerry Manuel would have continued this aggressive style of using his new bullpen. But instead of putting in K-Rod in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth he chose to bring in Pedro Feliciano who got into trouble and then with the game on the line the last guy in the Mets pen Darren O'Day was on the mound to give up the game losing hit. Its easy to criticize strategy after it fails but this is a constant with me. If I'm in a tie game in the 9th I'm using my best pitcher. At that point in the game the bottom of the ninth was the most important point. If you use anything other than your best you may never get to use him. Especially with the way the Mets were scoring off Florida's bullpen. I hope Jerry Manuel doesn't use K-Rod as only a three out guy in a save situation. While it may boost his save totals it will undoubtedly cost the team games. And isn't it what that's what its all about???

Thankfully this week I only heard the term at this pace once this week. Its pointless to tell me in the third game of the season at this pace a guy will score 254 runs!!!!

This one drives me mad. You just see a score from a game in which you have a player on your fantasy team. The real team scores like 12 runs but your guy goes 0-5. This happened twice to me this week.

Finally one word about the start of our fantasy league. I'm REALLY!!!!! happy to see all the teams except one have already made moves. Hopefully everyone will be it it all season long. Thats what makes it alot of fun. And after the first week congrats to Daniel for leading the pack. If this continues I'll never hear the end of it.