Series Recap: ALL OF THE L's

Overview: The Marlins lost three of four in Cincinnati.
Positives: The Miami Heat playoff run starts in two hours.
Negatives: It's hard to overstate how poor the Fish have been this year. They've yet to win back to back games and less than a month into the campaign, they're already eleven games under .500. And you know what the worst part of all is? I never learned to read. We still has no MONSTERDONGZ. :(
Line of the Week: [vacant]
Highlight of the Week: Placido Polanco made a nifty scoop and throw to end a Reds threat. 
Looking Ahead: The team takes a brief trip to Minnesota for two against the Twins.

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347

Image via BLS

Marlins Can't Get 500 People To Watch Them:

Ever attend or watch a Marlins game on TV and wonder what the discrepancy between the announced crowd and the actual crowd is?

One fan decided to do just that while attending the first leg of today's Marlins double-header against the Cincinnati Reds at Sun Life Stadium.

Twitter user @790Justin took a headcount at the first pitch of Wednesday's first game at 4:10 and tweeted the result: "Unofficial count of 347 at Sun Life for first pitch...myself included! Counted by hand. Still not the smallest crowd I've seen here."

Click through for my ace Strip Club With Stanton reference (blogger unity and all).

This story has already gotten a lot of play in the blogosphere, but to be fair, the afternoon double-header was announced the night before, and the game was moved because of a fucking hurricane. I'm letting my fellow South Floridians off the hook since they had bigger fish to fry Wednesday. Someone's got to...

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Guest Column

Note: The Marlins open a two-game series with the Reds today, and to make Reds manager Dusty Baker feel comfortable, we are letting Corey Patterson lead off the week with a guest post today.

The Evolution of the Leadoff Hitter
Corey Patterson

In the early days of baseball it was not uncommon for teams to employ their fastest player in the leadoff position. The reasoning behind this tactic was simple; by batting the fastest player leadoff, a team was able to put the person most likely to score on base ahead of its best hitters. Such a philosophy was necessarily complicated by the recent advent of Sabermetric analysis. Instead of merely getting on base and stealing bases, leadoff hitters are now asked to take lots of pitches in order to give their teammates a long look at the opposing pitcher and increase the pitcher's pitch count.

Of equal significance to this new emphasis on pitch counts is a concommittant de-emphasis on stolen bases. Sabermetric proponents, including Bill James, have argued that the risk of being caught stealing is not wort


















Note: Corey Patterson just strained a pectoral muscle. He will not be able to complete this column. We have replaced him with a video of a Peanuts cartoon in Portuguese.

Images via Walkoff Walk and Wayward Oriole

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