Bouring From Within

It can’t be easy to be the manager of a major league baseball team. True, the pay and the perks aren’t bad, and a lot of guys don’t mind the travel. But for one thing, there’s the uniform. It really serves no practical purpose, and even if you’re relatively young and relatively trim, like Kevin Cash or Joe Girardi, you’d still look better in a nice crisp Zegna. If you’re not and you’re not, you might as well be wearing a clown suit.

More importantly, it’s a job that seems to us to combine the worst aspects of being a bashful Jenner-Kardashian, if there is such a mutation (everything you do happens in the public eye, whether you like it or not), teaching at an elite all-boys prep school (there are a lot of rich adolescents in your clubhouse who have to be kept happy), chairing the semiotics department of an Ivy League university (you’re supposed to oversee a couple of dozen people who, by virtue of their superhuman talent and fanatical discipline, are better at their highly-specialized and completely-meaningless area of endeavor than almost anyone else on the planet, and have their own ideas about how to do things), and, if you’re unlucky, working for Andrew Cuomo (your boss is a selfish megalomaniac who views himself as a Master of the Universe and blames you when things go wrong). And then, at the end, no matter what else happens, you get fired.

So, as compassionate human beings, we must feel sorry for Mike Redmond, who appears to be a grownup and who has just been deposed, for no good reason, as the manager of the Miami Marlins by his capricious boss Jeffrey Loria (although, to be scrupulously fair in our comparisons, Loria’s taste in early Cubist painters is undoubtedly more discriminating than Cuomo’s). But all life is full of sadness. There is, for example, at least one person whom the New York Times deems worthy of being assigned book reviews who thinks that “reprisal” and “reprise” are synonyms, and evidently at least one editor in the Times’s employ who agrees. As gimlet-eyed Fantasy investors, we must steel ourselves to rise above such tragedies and ask only: can we turn Redmond’s misfortune to our advantage?

Possibly we can. The new Marlins manager is one Dan Jennings, who until Monday morning was their General Manager. There are reasons to be skeptical about this appointment. Jennings hasn’t managed or coached baseball since he did so for a high school about 30 years ago. He’s already a Marlins employee, which means that Loria doesn’t have to add another manager’s salary to the payroll, which is already listing under Loria’s ill-judged long-term obligations to Redmond and the absurd Ozzie Guillen. Moreover, Jennings has worked for the volatile Loria since MLB handed the latter the franchise in 2002, so those who suspect he’s no more than a flunky may have a point. Still, let those of us who’ve never said “I could do a better job than Lloyd McClendon [or fill in your own managerial bête noire, but really, has any of us not said that about Lloyd McClendon?]” cast the first stone, and let us wish Jennings well. The questions before us are: what personnel changes might he make, and how might we take advantage of them?

The problem in answering these questions is that Redmond had already made the most important change before his discharge. Redmond might still have his job, and we might still have our sanity, if Steve Cishek had done what the Marlins are paying him roughly $100,000 per appearance to do—viz., navigate the final innings of games in which his team has the lead without surrendering an unbecoming number of runs. Cishek wasn’t up to the task, and now it belongs to A.J. Ramos, who’s doing fine with it. Of course, Loria being Loria, it’s always possible that they’ll sign the superannuated “established closer” Rafael Soriano or, for all we know, lure “established closer” Bruce Sutter from retirement, rather than stick with Ramos, but if you’re sufficiently clairvoyant to envision the precise form of their folly in this regard, why are you paying attention to us?

Jennings already seems to have made the other obvious move as well. Over the winter, he himself signed 33-year-old Michael Morse, who last year had a decent season (his first since 2011) with the Giants as they went to and then won the World Series. Morse was signed, Jennings made clear at the time, precisely to provide that veteran je ne sais quoi in the clubhouse, and perhaps he’s doing so. Unfortunately, he’s also providing that veteran nous savons quoi on the field, with a .208/.269/.283 slash line. Meanwhile, sitting on the Marlins’ bench has been left-handed 27-year-old Justin Bour, who in 116 major league plate appearances between last year and this has hit .317/.388/.413. That won’t continue, because it’s attributable to an unsustainable .392 BABIP. But Bour has some power and some plate discipline, and while he’s not great against left-handed pitching, he’s not completely helpless, either. It looks, at the very least, like he’s hit his way into the strong side of a first base platoon with Morse, in which case figure maybe 350 plate appearances the rest of the way and a slash line of .270/.350/.450 with 10 home runs. It’s not Paul Goldschmidt—it’s not even an average MLB first baseman—but in a deep league, he sure beats the other likely corner infield waiver candidates, and if the unthinkable happens to Victor Martinez or you’ve got a Utility spot to fill, you could do worse.

Otherwise, most of the individual Marlins aren’t underperforming, and the ones who are don’t have plausible minor-league backups. A few weeks ago, we opined that Mat Latos could be jettisoned from your Fantasy team with impunity. Since that time, he’s produced three quality starts. Yet we hew to our original view. If your league doesn’t use QS, he hasn’t done you any good, and his problems with diminished velocity remain. Plus, this oft-injured pitcher is hurt again. So he is now officially a Birchwood Brothers Muscular Boy, and it’s ok with us if you banish him.

So let’s say Latos is toast. Or maybe not, but maybe Henderson Alvarez reinjures himself, or Dan Haren starts feeling his age, or David Phelps stops overperforming. Or let’s say—because it’s the case—that Jarred Cosart goes on the DL. However it develops, there’s room in the rotation. What might—what did–the Marlins do? They summoned from Double A 23-year-old Dominican prospect Kendry Flores, who’s got all of 7 games of experience there. He’s a legitimate prospect, and has been superb at Jacksonville so far this year. But the guy we like, and hereby designate a Pick Hit, is a different 23-year-old Dominican prospect, now pitching for Triple-A New Orleans. That would be Jose Urena. He throws harder than Flores, but gives up fewer walks, although he also gets fewer strikeouts. His K/BB rate has steadily improved as he’s made his way through the minors, he throws 4 pitches, and can reach 97 mph on a good day. He’s 4-0 with a microscopic ERA at New Orleans this season; he’s given up more walks than he usually does, but we speculate that it’s a blip—his control has generally been strong. He had an unhappy two-inning relief outing against the Mets last month during a brief call-up , but we’ll tell you something: we happened to watch that stint, and except for a regrettable slider (we think) that slid into a two-run homer by Wilmer Flores, he looked pretty good. He mixed his pitches, he was poised, he fooled some good hitters, and Flores’s home run aside, he wasn’t hit hard. He should get you a decent ERA and WHIP, and at least an average number of strikeouts. Whatever happens with Flores, it’s easy to envision Urena, with Jennings’s blessings and prayers, stepping into the rotation and not stepping out again, and bringing some value to your Fantasy team.

But then again, honesty compels us to add that you probably shouldn’t listen to us about starting pitchers. Our freefall through the NFBC Main Event standings in the last ten days or so is too painful to recount in detail this week, but we’ll disclose that, since May 9th, our several starting pitchers have combined for an ERA of 5.44, and they weren’t doing especially well before that either. Pardon the hubris, but watching our heartthrob Mike Leake (he of the five consecutive quality starts) give up 9 earned runs in 5 excruciating innings last Saturday, we knew how Julius Caesar felt when Brutus emerged from the crowd of conspirators to dirk him.

Nonetheless, we’ll lick our wounds (our own, not each other’s) and continue to do business at the Fangraphs stand. Indeed, as of today, we are extending our media empire. Please join us on Twitter @birchwoodbroth2, where we’ll do our best to make 140 characters seem just as verbose as this blog.