Team Offense, Miami Marlins

The 2023 series on team offense continues with the Miami Marlins. The Marlins finished twenty eighth in the majors and last in the National League in 2022 with 3.62 runs scored per game.

This season I am using FanGraphs Roster Resource Depth Charts* as the source of default lineups. That Skip Schumaker batting order is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. That information produces the following results (Runs per game):

Best lineup: 4.39
Probable lineup: 4.23
Worst lineup: 4.05
Regressed lineup: 4.10

Once again, Luis Arraez arrives on a team that would rather lead-off with a player whose strength comes from his slugging percentage. In this case, it’s Jazz Chisholm Jr. The default lineup puts Chisholm at the top, with the somewhat unproductive Jorge Soler batting second.

I could accept this if minor league stats showed Chisholm with a history of getting on base, but he was just okay in the minors. If the Marlins were looking for speed at the top of the order, I might understand Chisholm at the top if there were a couple of other sluggers on the team. I suspect it would fairly obvious to most people that Arraez in front of Chisholm should produce more runs that the other way around.

On the other hand, if the WBC power display by Arraez is real, I might be tempted to change my mind. We will see.

In general, however, there are a lot of hitters in the wrong part of the lineup, but even with that it looks like the team should have a better year at the plate. The lineup is not an auspicious start for first time manager Skip Shumaker.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Previous posts in this series:

*This is the best version of this information I’ve seen, with everything you might want to know on one page.

March 19, 2023

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