2013 Macropreview

Ready or not, baseball season is back, and Marlins fans are feeling justifiably meh about the start of what should be a down year. Out are Johnson, Reyes, Buehrle, et al; in are a bunch of guys whose names we still haven't learned.

As we do every season, we've combed the web for as many preseason projections as we could find, and averaged them together to find the consensus opinion on the team heading into the season. Unsurprisingly, the baseball world takes a dim view of the 2013 Marlins (who may as well be called Giancarlo Stanton and the Eight Dwarves...). The Marlins are projected to finish 69-93, the exact same record the team put up in its dismal 2012 season. Only one projection had them out of the NL East basement, with win totals ranging from 64.5 to 76. Below are the projections:

Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria has essentially already proven himself correct when he asserted that the Marlins can at least repeat the results of last year's team (which had a payroll above $90 million) on a shoestring budget. And even if he is wrong, and the Marlins win 55 or 60 games, last place is still last place. This season could go down as his most effective (if self-defeating) troll job EVER (and that's including his trade of the Expos fanchise for the Marlins in 2002).

As for the upcoming season, Michael Jong described the Marlins' prospects best at Fish Stripes (his emphases):

As a group, this stripped-down version of the Marlins is expected to be as good as the 2012 Marlins were. Of course, this does not mean that this group is as talented as the 2012 Marlins, who were expected to play a lot better than they actually did. ... In a way, owner Jeffrey Loria was right about not paying for a losing team, but the question was whether that losing team [he expected if the 2012 club remained intact] was really going to be present given their expected regression back up towards their mean.

We'll be here all season as usual, sharing in the ups and (mostly) downs, looking for that sliver of absurdity that makes it fun to be a Marlins fan even in the worst of times. We're happy that you'll join us for another ride.