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Speaker 1: Here we go, the official show on the fish Stripes podcast channel. I'm Eli Sussman, the managing editor of fish Stripes, where we cover the Miami Marlins every day in our own way. Full coverage up on fishstripes dot com. Check out our website. Follow us on every platform imaginable, including subscribing to the podcast. I'm sure most of you already do so if you haven't yet, leave a rating and review for this on Apple. Every new rating and review that we get down the stretch of the season is an extra dollar that fish Stripes will donate towards the Player's Alliance. Learn everything you need to know about that great organization at the Players Alliance dot com and make your own donation if you have the means to do so. It's about a week and a half since the last time I did a full solo episode of the podcast. During that time, the Marlins I've been playing well. This has been quietly their best extended stretch of the entire twenty twenty one season. Unfortunately, it comes at a time of year where it's the least consequential time of the season to be going on this type of run, winning five of their last seven series, most of this episode is not going to be about, you know, the micro sample that we're looking at right now. I'm going to be reviewing bold predictions that were made six months ago at the Marlins season, because we have reached a point where just about all those bold predictions have been resolved one way or another, and they were made between myself and arm Leyden of Just Baseball and Lockdown Marlins. We'll be reviewing the predictions we made, you know, the thought processes that we went into them, what went right or wrong to make those predictions, you know, line or off pace. It should be a lot of fun. Well, you know, real quickly, before getting into that, I do have the comment about, you know, the two men of the hour for this Marlins team, the rookie outfielders Heyesus Sanchez and Brian Dela Cruz. I already did a full pot on Dela Cruz like a month ago, where I was extremely excited about what he had done. You know, even in that really tiny sample early on through the better part of August, I think there were signs that this was like legit, like the Marlins had found in probably a lasting piece of their organization in exchange for a pending free agent reliever in Yimi Garcia, something that very rarely happens. The jury is still very much out on him. I'll continue to say that the rest of the season, throughout the off season, the sample is just not big enough. I've gotten a lot of content out of him. I'll have a new article up on him on fishtripes dot com shortly as well that I hope you guys check out. He's been terrific in all aspects of the game, and there's really no downside to it, you know, other than realizing that his raw stats at the moment, you know, being one of the National Leagu's league leading hitters, being forty percent better than a league average in terms of weighted runs created. Plus you know that stuff will come back down to earth and there's still more to learn about really all aspects of his game. But I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled for everybody involved, and on top of everything else, he just seems like a really impressive human being that is already being well liked by his teammates. On Sanchez, he's the guy that I've also held in high regard pretty much, you know, throughout the year. He was right before graduating from my prospects list a couple of weeks ago. He was my number six overall prospect. I had him in the third tier of prospects, and I had him as the best outfield prospect remaining in the Marlins organization, mainly because of his bat. You can see it him from watching him and in the measurables as well. Both you know the exit velocity that he registers, his understanding of the strike zone, his presence in the batter's box, Do not overlook how important that is as well, and his just comfort being at the major league level after falling on his face frankly in that first sample that he got in twenty twenty, at this moment, hitting sixteen percent better than the league average in terms of WRC plus. He has put up the stat on Twitter he has eight home runs over the past three weeks or so, and the only player in Major League Baseball with more during that span is Triple Crown hopeful AL MVP candidate Vladimir Guerrero Junior. That's the kind of company that he's keeping lately, and he's doing it against all sorts of competition. The power is legit. I'd say there are some similarities with that tool to somebody like Garrett Cooper, and Cooper is somebody that is kind of top of the scale that on the Marlins roster when healthy in terms of his game power, and Sanchez has that attribute to him similar to Cooper, though we'll have to figure out exactly where he fits in defensively because right now, the left field experiment that the Marlins tried earlier this year it did not go great. And even in right field, there are just some situations where he makes poor decisions despite having the tools to be at least an average defender, if not better than that. And the same thing goes with base running as well. The same thing goes with in the batter's box, that there's a certain level of decision making that hopefully he can learn over time with enough reps and with the right mindset when he's on the field, at the very least, the bat gives him a very high floor with this organization. So having these two together and the fact that they seem to be great friends with each other, that makes it even better that both of them are performing so well so early in their career, because we have been deprived of that throughout this entire course of the rebuilds, it is a sigh of relief to know that there's nothing really fundamentally broken with the way that the Marlins coach and develop hitting that you know, maybe they're doing something right and that others can follow in their footsteps. That's the most important part. Because even these
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two guys continue being kind of who they have been this season as rookies, they'll need reinforcements. This lineup does need more. Kim Ang even said as much in a recent interview with in Jacksonville last week that they need more impact bats. They need ones that have been there and done that before these guys, for they seem to be a great piece of that combination. Maybe there's a scenario where they can out to be the centerpiece of a trade in order to get somebody that really does have that long track record. Both of them have really boosted their stocks this year, and that's that's really all you're looking for at this time of year, when you know what happens on the field doesn't really matter. That you look for those individual like silver linings and developmental success stories. Both those guys definitely trending in that direction. So now we get to the focus of this episode, which is revisiting bold predictions that were made exactly three three months, six months ago. Exactly six months ago, myself and arm Leaden, we independently came up with five bold predictions each about the twenty twenty one Marlin season. This was recorded right in the middle of spring training games, I guess, just past the midpoint of the Grapefruit League schedule. We're going to retrace each of these ten combined predictions, and I think that will also do a good job of kind of, like, you know, summarizing maybe some things that you had been overlooking at this stage of the season in terms of where we thought we were back in March and where we are now, which is a couple weeks remaining in the season. As a side note, this comes perfectly timed with Arham's publication of his top one hundred prospects in Baseball that's up on just Baseball dot com. We were just talking about a couple of rookies, you know, in that first segment with de la Cruz and Sanchez, so we'll keep on that subject when going through this first bold prediction from Arham, which was Trevor Rodgers finishing top three in National League Rookie of the Year voting. We'll have to wait at least another month to get, you know, confirmation on that when he's announced as a finalist for the award, but you can lock it up. Lead to arm on the podcast in July, I think, and even back then I told him to take a bow for making this prediction. Absolutely nailed it with Trevor Rodgers, who of course had a kind of a bumpy introduction to the majors in twenty twenty, at least in terms of run prevention. The peripherals were really encouraging. Though. He made improvements over the offseason, both physically and in terms of pitch execution and sequencing. Those showed up in spring training games, and like, even in that setting, knowing how easy it is to be fooled by that, there did seem to be a legitimate uptick in everything about him. He carried that into the regular season. He won nationallygu Rookie the Month in April and in May. It's really cool and really special. Of course, we know how his season one sideways
through no fault of his own, you know, through just a personal emergency situation that the Marlins and him, they decided that he needed time away from the team, and that obviously cut into some of his counting stats. Since he came back from that, he has not been quite the same. The overall body of work, though, is incredible. He is going to finish the season with a sub three er and a sub three fielder independent pitching while being a starting pitcher as a rookie. That is so rare, and he is kind of far and away the best National League rookie pitcher in the league. But it is looking almost a fate a complete that Jonathan India of the Cincinnati Reds their leadoff hitter every day second baseman. He's going to win the award. If it's not unanimous, it could be fairly close to that. When Arum was making this prediction, he came close to predicting Rogers to win the award outright. He kind of rained that back in and said top three. And that was a wise choice because it was still pretty bold. It was bold because he was not the top Rookie of the Year candidate on the Marlins roster. In the Marlins projected rotation, I think anybody else would have had six do Sanchez in a vacuum. You know as the one that had a better chance of being successful this year. We know that six to zero unfortunately was sidelined the entire year by a shoulder injury, and that Rogers, aside from that episode of back spasms, that he thankfully has been able to make more than two thirds of the starts that he was scheduled to make, entering this year a huge step in his career. I am pretty comfortable saying that arm got this one that no matter what happens in these final closing weeks, it looks like Rogers could have about three starts remaining at most maybe two or three, that he is going to finish very high up in those voting. So we'll go now to one of mine. How about it will go from that to another one with a rookie pitcher, one that I made and will clearly miss on. Although it was to be fair, I went really bold with this one. Anthony Bender leading the Marlins in saves. He has three saves for the team right now as I record this. He's probably going to finish the year with three resaves as well. I made the prediction again going back to spring training, before we knew when and if he'd be on the Marlins roster for sure. I fell in love with him almost as soon as I saw him in his first grape Fruit League games. Came out of nowhere. He was not on my radar when they signed him over the offseason to a minor league deal. As soon as he got in a competitive setting, this stuff was there, both the fastball and the slider, the way they played off each other, the commands that he had. That was something that historically he had lacked, and as this season has gone on it has occasionally been an issue for him as well. But the fact that it was good enough for him to be a big leaguer to start his career with one of the longest scoreless streaks for any major reliever ever to begin somebody's career, I was onto something. It's just an inexact science when it comes to saves, because one you need to get that opportunity in the first place. And my thought process was that the Marlins would end up trading rearranging their back into their bullpen during the year. I wasn't in love with either Anthony Bass or Jimmy Garcia or even Dylan Floro. I thought there would be, you know, some unrest there and there was you know, almost immediately Anthony Bass was kicked out of the closers role, Jimmy Garcia filled his shoes, and Jimmy Garcia was traded at the deadline. And in between, Bender did get a couple windows of time to kind of not even be the full time closer, but at least being a closer by committee, and unfortunately he didn't take advantage of it. He had his best work in May and June, and then he hit a pretty big rough patch and he's been up and down kind of since then. The overall rookie season for him has been terrific. He is let's see, does he lead all Marlins relievers in strikeouts this year? Sixty seven of them and yeah, pretty far and away the most strikeouts among Marlins relievers. He's only a had five home runs all year, and yeah, the peripherals and the run prevention kind of line up for him. It was just about the lack of opportunity and credit to Dylan Floro. So after Jimmy got traded, Floro was part of that committee and he just gradually separated himself from everybody else. He hasn't been perfect in that role, but He's been pretty great doing a lot of the things that Bender does, but have this a larger track record of being a major league reliever. He has even better control of his stuff as well, and so Floro has locked that down. Yimmy. Right now, he leads the former Marlin at this point, leads the team with fifteen saves. Floro has a chance to catch him. By the end of the year, Floro has twelve, but Bender with three. Unless the Marlins win every one of their games down the stretch, and they win almost all them close and safe situations and they Bender in all those same situations, it's just not going to happen, unfortunately. Again, the larger point when we make these predictions is about players, you know, we feel high about, and I do pat myself on the back for believing in Bender that early on the season. He is going to be a fascinating piece of this Marlins pitching staff moving forward. Going back to Arum, his second bold prediction was his worst. Well, I'll just be frank about that. The one that I was you know, I wasn't shocked at at the time, you know, I could see where he was going with this. Corey Dickerson earning National League All Star honors. You know, the first couple weeks of the regular season, he was piling up the hits. I don't know if people remember that he was hitting in the mid three hundreds for the early portion of April. He just never really got the other aspects of his game going. The power that we thought might return after a down twenty twenty he never did. Defensively, he was
limited to left field and nothing spectacular out there, So there was really no point where he was a true every day starting player for the Marlins, even once Starling Marte went out for an injury. Garrett Cooper had his inconsistencies, like Dickerson was still they he never really had the full confidence of Don Mattingly. The key missing detail was that power and that played discipline that had made him a really desirable player a couple of years ago when the Marlins signed him out of free agency. The stats ended up being extremely in line with where they had been during the previous previous campaign for him as a Marlin. He had two sixty three three twenty four three eighty slash line. That's below the league average. That's an ops in the low seven hundreds. He only had two home runs in sixty three games. You know what happened from there. The Marlins were kind of eager to unload him once he suffered an injury, so eager that they ate some of his money, and they essentially gave away Adam Simber in that trade, someone who has thrived since going to Toronto, whereas Dickerson really hasn't. You know, he had a little hot streak with them shortly after coming back from the injured list, But the overall numbers are extremely similar. A seven h five ops with the Marlins, a seven to eleven ops with a Blue Jays where he's playing even less often than he was with the Marlins. So we Corey is he's had a really interesting career. We certainly hope for the best for him as he's going to enter free agency after this offseason. But yeah, Arm kind of misfired on that. As we know, Marlins only had one All Star this year, and it was, you know, from his previous prediction, Trevor Rodgers. So he more than makes up for this miss with his second prediction of three downs seven to go. We'll go to one where this is sort of bundling two together because both Arm and I independently came up with predictions for Pablo Lope that were eerily similar. So the one that I had for Pablo was that he would receive nl Cy Young Award votes. With that award each year kind of depends on the particulars of the season, but usually between about six and ten or eleven pitchers in each league that gets Siung Award votes. Most of it is tied to performance, tied to your stats, with a little bit of a narrative splashed in. Pablo last year did have that narrative kind of going for him. He was the one steady piece in the Marlins rotation that was able to make every turn in the rotation and had a career year. I believed that everything he had done in twenty twenty was sustainable and that there was even room for him to improve a little bit more, throwing his change up a little bit more, working a little bit deeper into games, that there was ways for him to improve his strikeout numbers and obviously improve his overall workload after being limited earlier in his career by shoulder issues. And the long story short is that any chance he had at making this prediction come true was taken away by
yet another shoulder issues, a rotator cuff strain that was discovered right after the All Star break. He hasn't pitched since then. There's still the door opened slightly for him to return to the Marlins roster the final week of the season, but unless he pitches a fifty inning perfect game something insane like that, he's just not going to have the amazing enough overall numbers to quite crack that club. His numbers look pretty similar to twenty twenty with some mild improvements. I mean, you know that he set a major league record this year at one point one of his final starts by striking out nine consecutive braves batters to start his game. That had never been done before in the majors. Overall, a three point zero three era, a three point twenty fielder independent pitching, only ten home runs allowed in one hundred and one innings, well more more than a strikeout per inning, doing well against righty's against lefties, he was awesome at home. If he was as well as effective in road games as he was at Lone Depot Park, then maybe he would have been. In that conversation, this ties almost perfectly into one that Arm came up with himself a separate Bold prediction. We did these independently, and the one that ARM came up with is that Pablo would rank a top five in National League earned run average. And as I told you, the number he has going into this final structure of the season is three to three, and if you pull up the National League leaders, he doesn't qualify to be a traditional qualifier for the league. This is something that gets to go on a brief tangent. I think the league has to change. They should lower the threshold. Right now, it's you need to throw one inning for every team game, so for the season at least one hundred and sixty two innings, but barely anybody does that anymore due to injuries, due to precautionary rests, due to the fact that team relying more on their bullpen than ever before. So if you lowered that threshold to one hundred innings so that it just includes Pablo, then you find that he is fifteenth in the National League in ERA fifteen out of fifty eight, so in the top quarter of the entire National League. Not quite as elite as ARM was forecasting him to be, but great a great season that Pablo was having prior to that shoulder issue. Very important to see if he's able to fully return to being healthy at this very end of the year so that they don't have that injury concern lurking over their entire offseason with him, because they have some interesting decisions to look into with their entire pitching staff. And Pablo is a guy who's entering a point of his career where either you see him as a potential trade candidate or potential extension candidate, and you could always just played out year by year as well, but he's somebody that has a lot of value either to the Marlins or to another team, especially if he's healthy. That's going to be the key. So we're halfway through ten total Bold predictions that would put together, and so far, yeah, the only one that was a clear hit was arum on Trevor Rodgers and the National League Rookie of the Year. We'll go to another one of mine here, which will be the Marlins. This is the one that I missed the biggest on. I'd say the Marlins defense ranking number one in Major League Baseball. I kept that vague and open ended, but it was with the idea that through some combination of defensive efficiency through stats like defensive unsaved, just the overall perception of the team that the Marlins fielding would be as good as anybody's in the league, and that hasn't been the case. The biggest reason why I miss fired on this was coming down to personnel, just the individual players that ended up playing the most for the Marlins, where I liked the bounce back potential of their veteran outfielders. So some of that was Corey Dickerson optimism that Starlinge Marte and Adam Duval would age well and that that was kind of all the money, wasn't it with Marte and Duval. Unfortunately, they ended up trading both Marte and Duval at the deadline, so that took a big bite into it. I thought Mickey Rowe would be really steady at shortstop, which he has been, and I thought Brian Anderson is still extremely underrated. This could be the year that he made that leap to be a true Gold Glove contender, and unfortunately with BA he was playing great defense, but more than half of his season was wiped out with that shoulder injury. They will now require surgery. Some guys I thought we'd see more of that. We really didn't until the very end. Is Lewin Diez. I thought they'd find a way to squeeze him into the team early in the season, that once he got called up at some point that he would be there to stay. And we know the Marlins they had a very different philosophy when it came to that. They did not call him up on a permanent basis until just this past week when hayss Aguilar suffered what seems to be a season ending knee injury. The number of reps that he's going to get is just a tiny fraction of what I think was reasonable to forecast for him. He was a pretty substantial defensive upgrade at first base compared to just about anybody else on the Marlins roster that they weren't getting. I was hoping for a career year defensively for Jorge al Farrow. I was not really buying into any sort of change in his plate approach, which is notoriously terrible. He just seemed to have a great understanding that he was in a make or break year here. In twenty twenty one, he talked about putting in the work over the off season to address that to become a more well rounded defensive catcher after being inconsistent in that regard. After being benched for the playoffs in twenty twenty, he had all the motivation he needed being in a situation where his career is going just year by year that he knew the urgency to figure it out on that end. As it played out, he just didn't translate at all whatever work that he was putting in during the offseason. It didn't help. It
got so bad that for this final two months of the schedule he has been relegated to a part time left fielder and an emergency first baseman. They moved him off the position entirely because they've lost so much hope in him being able to contribute on that side of the ball and while also you know, being able to keep his focus on the bat as well. We we've talked about that how asinine it is the way that they've handled him, But it just starts with the fact that he was did not take that step forward defensively that a lot of people, myself included, thought he was capable of doing. Yeah, I could go through even others on the list. Jazz Jazz Chisholm who will be getting to in just a few minutes. Jazz is not at the defensive season that we thought he might have. He got off to a really nice start as their second baseman. Ever since coming back from that very first injury, that hamstring injury that suffered in late April, he hasn't been as good. And we know he's been really overmatched as a shortstop in those opportunities, also at second base. Just a lot of routine stuff that he is over complicating it. So when you put it all together, there's been I think this miss misrepresentation of the defense that just because they're among the major league leaders and errors that they are at the very bottom of the defensive scale. I don't think that's accurate that you really put it all together there right around the middle of the pack, if not slightly above average. The kind of ground that these guys cover, the smart defensive positioning that the Marlins have to put their guys in positions to be sixsful and to be able to catch up to balls that they ordinarily wouldn't. It's it's fine, it's fine, but it needs to be a greater strength of this team moving forward. I believe that it can be some of the pieces that they have in place this year. Unfortunately, it wasn't there for them, and it's one reason why you know they're pitching. This flows perfectly into another one of arms bold predictions about the team era. He thought the Marlins pitching staff would rank top three in the National League and earned on average. Well, I should clarify that, you know, his bold prediction was that they could do this. Remember these are all purposely bold. That we made these predictions known that the likelihood of the coming tree wasn't great. Going out on a limb, he thought the Marlins would crack the top three and National League in era, and that's not going to happen. And it's really even before you go into exactly what happened with the Marlins, it's more so just three amazing teams separating themselves. It's the Dodgers, It's the Giants, It's the Brewers. Have been amazing at pitcher run prevention. The Dodgers as a team, as we go to the final lease of the season, they have a team er below three, which is otherworldly to maintain over a full length season. The Brewers and the Giants just credit to them. They these were not perceived to be great teams heading into regular
season by any measure, And as it turns out, the Giants are the best record in baseball, and the Brewers are not that far behind. The Giants and the Dodgers teams. Both those teams have already punished their ticket to be in the postseason, led as much as anything by their great pitching staff, so those teams are kind of out of reach. The Marlins are above average in terms of er in the National League, where they can finish anywhere from fourth to seventh, and the way things are trending, it looks like they'll be like six or seven the National League. Again, still above average, even at a time where Lone Depot Park is playing more hitter friendly than ever before. In general, still favors pitchers, but they keep bringing in those fences every couple of years. It is going to catch up eventually in changing those conditions, led, of course, by more so than anybody else, Sandy al Contra. And that's the guy I'm kicking myself about, because he's the one that if you look at the bulk predictions at arm and I had about Pablo, you know Sandy has really eclipsed them. This year by taking it another step forward in his game. The most important part is that he's just been so durable. He's been even not just from start to start, but within starts, from ending to ending. He is a perfect role model for all the Marlins pitchers coming up in this organization about how to continually make adjustments and get better. So he's the one that has put that brought that er in the right direction just due to the shoe volume of his reps. Both Pablo and Trevor have been great, just as good in terms of era when they've been available, although both of them, of course, as I mentioned, have missed some time this year in the bullpen, I touched on some of these guys as well, Anthony Bender, Dylan Floro, sub three eras from both of those guys. Really the main culprit here was the back end of that rotation, the injuries that they had from the very beginning of the year with six Do and Eliezer Hernandez. When eliz Or Hernandez got back, he's been up and down a little bit. He has not been the best version of himself due to more so than anything, I point to his command just being not as precise as it was during the short season, all the other guys filling their shoes at the back end of the rotation. It's been messy. We got a little bit of Nick Knider, Braxton Garrett, Jordan Holloway had his moments, but also especially when he's putting a starter's role, it just did not work for him so many openers. The Marlins, of course, by far, set a record for using the most total starting pitchers in franchise history this year. They have used eighteen different starting pitchers this year, and most of them have been below average when they've been in that role. The future looks super bright if arm wants to double down on that prediction next year for them to finish top three in the National League. And eer, I don't even think you'd call that a bold prediction. They are well set up to do something like that moving forward. So we are through seven bold predictions. A quick refresher these combined between arm Leyden and myself Trevor Rodgers finishing top three in National League Rookie of the Year that's on the money. All these other ones so far have been fairly off in one way or the other. Corey Dickerson earning a National League All Star selection, Papulo Lopez ranking top five and National League ERA or earning National League Cy Young Award votes, Marlin's pitching staff ranking top three in National League Eer Anthony Bender leading the Marlins and saves, and the Marlins defense ranking number one in Major League Baseball. One for six so far, my second to last one for myself individually, so number eight out of our ten combined. Let's talk about Jazz. Jazz. I had him hitting twenty plus home runs this season in his rookie season, his first full major league season after the Cup of Coffee last year. I was feeling pretty good those first opening weeks of the season when he was barreling up Jacob de Grom. Everybody remembers that, and not just him. He had a handful of home runs in April before that first injury. He was in one moment leading all baseball qualifiers in barrel rate, which tends to be a important predictor of hitting for power in games moving forward, And when you look at his season overall, it's been fine relative to expectations, and more than fine if you consider where Marlins thought they were with this second base situation entering the year. He absolutely has the potential to be a good everyday player for a number of years, and he's done things this year that should improve as he gets older. This is not the peak that Jazz is back to. For whatever reason, he has not been barreling the ball nearly as frequently as the season has worn on as he was earlier in the year. You know, forget everything else, Like there are certain things you could kind of understand a guy not being able to sustain over the course of a long season, especially when you're inexperienced. It has been a bit of a head scratcher that he fell off so much with that home run pace. When he does barrel up, it goes a long way. I think his average home run distance is right up there with the best on the entire Marlins team. So he reached down a fielder's choice in the sixth inning and Jazz hits one time. As we record this, with sixteen Marlins games to go, he is at fifteen home runs. Can he hit five over the last sixteen games. Potentially, it's possible that would just be the pace that he was at the very start of this year. I would call that unlikely. So this is the one that we still don't have like a final clarification on which way it's gonna go, but I can say kind of objectively that it's unlikely he'll hit that mark in terms of home runs. What he's been missing also a little bit, is I thought he would be able to hit homers to all fields. And let me pull up the splits right now, at least anecdotally and by the eye tests, I feel like almost all
of his home runs this year have been pulled home runs instead of being able to use the whole field. Yeah, only one home run that went truly to the opposite field all season. He has hit a couple to center field as well to dead center, but I thought he'd be using the opposite field a little bit more. That's kind of one key ingredient that's been missing for Jazz that I thought that When you also look at the way he's been hitting, let's look at it against left handed pitching when he's at that platoon disadvantage. Those numbers overall have been fine, actually extremely similar against both lefties and righty's. Yeah, so that really hasn't been an issue with him, But yeah, not quite as disciplined as the season has gone on, and not getting into as many favorable accounts as he potentially could do moving forward. This is another one where if we look at twenty twenty two and you predict that Jazz is going to get twenty plus home runs, that is not bold at all because he has that firm lock on the second base job at this point and it's no longer a doubt. I think this was a nice The process behind this was sounds in my opinion, because this is one we made in spring training, before the end of spring training, when Esan Diez was still neck and neck with him in terms of making it on the opening day roster. It was not a sure thing that Jazz would be on the opening day roster in twenty twenty one. When I made this pick in the first place, I was pretty confident that he would eventually take over us an everyday player and that he would certainly outperform Isan, which has proven to be very, very true. The reaching twenty will be a tough one down the stretch, so something he'll do in the future. I may have been a little bit premature on that, so final to both predictions to review, this is one where we went head to head arm and I we came up with these completely separately, but both of us had an individual minor league player in minds that we thought would have a big year, and he went with Griffin Conine and I went with Cameron Meisner. These predictions made I think before even minor league spring training even started, so we didn't know that these guys would actually start the season as teammates. Both of them were assigned to High A Blite, playing pretty much every single day to start the year. Meisner played really all three of the outfield spots. Conine was mostly in the corners and with plenty of designated hitter reps as well. Both guys that were early round draft picks coming out of college but had not had the opportunity to play a full length minor league baseball season until now. And my big thought process was going with Meisner, which is pretty much the same as from arms perspective, is that we thought these guys, even if they did have this amazing year, they were a little too far down on the outfield depth chart to actually break through to the majors, so they'd be putting up these numbers in the minor leagues and they would be contenders for the
Marlins Minor League Player of the Year honors. That's what these bold predictions were, being the top organizational position player. The process that the team uses to determine that is a little bit fuzzy just looking at precedent. It's guys that play pretty much every day that it put up a lot of home runs, that hit for a high average, that are just really good, mostly offensive players. Over the course of a full length season. Arm took a big lead what may prove to be an insurmountable lead over me in this category because Griffin Conine through the first couple months of the season was fantastic. He was better than I think even ARM envisions, leading all of minor league baseball in home runs for the vast majority of the season. He hit I believe it was twenty two of them at High A ble Loite before finally forcing a promotion to the next level, and they really had to contort the roster kind of to squeeze him on twenty three. Excuse me. He had twenty three home runs in six games, more than one every three games, basically hitting two home runs every week at the High A level ops at nine to sixty nine prior to his promotion, the strikeouts were there and they have always been there and they will continue to be there. With Griffin Conine, there's going to be just a cap on his ability to get hits, just because of all the swing and missing this game. When he was making contact, it was going a long way, it was going to all fields. It was an awesome show and understandably an incredible story for the son of mister Marlin Jeff Conine. Meanwhile, with Cameron Meiser, he was slow out of the gate, really slow. He was drawing his walks. That is a trait that he's always had, being really disciplined, being very patient. He was contributing, of course to Bloit, an extraordinary base runner and bass steeler, as well as all reference now and we'll go back to in just a moment. Meisner was a guest on the new episode of Swimming Upstream, the podcast from Fish on the Farm, where he talked about his base stealing secrets, or at least he hinted at it being able to time up the pitcher and get to a certain point and turning it into a math equation in terms of being whether or not he'd be able to reach the next spase in time and to this point in his career. It has worked out fabulously, certainly with the boost from having certain rule changes in High A this year that made it even easier to steal than before. He was taken advantage of it. He just wasn't hitting for impact for the first couple months of this minor league season, which was also kind of the case in his previous year in twenty nineteen as well, something to be a little bit concerned about, and it ticked up for him right around the start of July, especially as we got towards the end of July. That's when he really started being a run producer. Most of that actually right after Griffin got promoted to Double A. Then Meisner became like the one guy to circle in their lineup and he thrived on it. So he had a streak in there where I think he reached base like thirty consecutive games, and he himself he forced his way up to Double A as well, so once again as a record this They've now been teammates for the final few weeks of the season at Double A Pensacola, both of them playing close to every day in the outfield for Pensacola, and Meisner has stayed hot. He as we answered play on Wednesday night, hitting three thirty three with a nine to forty three ohps since getting the move up, drawing a lot of walks, hitting a ton of doubles, a stat that Alex Scarver brought up on Fishing on the Farm that he leads the Marlins organization with twenty nine doubles, more than anybody else at any other level of the organization. And one thing he said on the podcast, and I have a quote here about kind of what clicked for him as the season went on, just being aware of my overall swing, he said, just knowing myself has allowed me to spit on pitches that my swing doesn't play well with, and it has allowed me to get to pitches that my swing does play well with. As simple as that, he is just knowing playing to your strengths as a player and being able to barre up the ball once you do so. He really does bare up the ball great. So we get to this point, the season is winding down. This is the final few days of the minor league regular season, which is why I'm recording this now. It's you'd be surprised, you know how similar now their seasons. Look where Conine has an eight sixty six OPS, Meisner has a seven to ninety five OPS. But Meisner adds a lot more value as a base runner twenty six stolen bases and thirty tries compared to Conine with just three stolen bases. In terms of on base percentage, Meser at fifty eight and Conine at three thirty two. In terms of extra base hits, it's still a pretty significant lead for Conine forty nine extra base hits, including thirty six home runs, which is still second best in all minor league baseball. Meisner has forty six extra base hits, and you know, just to stop teasing you long. Based on how this stuff usually goes and with the narrative backing him up, Conine is the favorite to win Minor League Player of the Year. Really, the only guys that could steal it from him would have to be ones that we haven't even brought up. Peyden Burdick, who was very highly regarded prospect entering this year, and as he's a nice fusion kind of of Meisner and of Conine with his his aggressiveness and also with his power and also with his outfield versatility and all that, like Burdick, has had a very compa years to these guys, even without the one standout stat to back him up. And Troy Johnston, who really was under the radar entering twenty twenty one, starting in Low A, spending most of the season in High A, where his offensive production has been arguably better than any of these other guys as a run producer, as an on base machine, his consistency has been certainly better than either Conine or Meisner. But you know, just to wrap it up, I do think Conine is going to win, and I think even the fact that it's even close gives a lot of credit to Arum over me. Because Meisner was the consensus quote unquote better prospect entering twenty twenty one. That might still be the case, but it has not necessarily made him the better candidate for this award this season. Arum believed in Griffin's work ethic and the adjustments that he'd made. They'd paid off. They certainly have to put together a really memorable year for him. So it is one definitive bold prediction that Aram nailed with Trevor Rodgers, and this one is pretty close to a lock as well with Griffin Conine winning Minor League Player of the Year. I think I did fine with the Cameron Meisner one. He did have a good year. I'll be curious to see whether he plays in Fall League's. He's no doubt gonna get a invite to Major league spring training next year, and I think he's on track to have a nice, nice career, either with the Marlins or with another team. And I got close with the Jazz chiz one too. If he had just stayed healthy, avoid those nick cuts and bruises, and he would have had that fairly easily if that had been the case, And even now you know he has if everything goes right for him down the stretch, maybe is a chance to take care of that again. I encourage you to check out all of arham stuff, Locked on Marlins podcast, everything on Just Baseball, including the podcast that he does with Jeff Conine if you were not familiar with that. Outside the Box of Jeff Conine has been a fantastic show that debuted this summer and does a great job of balancing mister Marlin's memories from his playing career and also his foresight into where the game is headed moving forward. Be sure to check that out. And another plug for Fish on the Farm and They're Swimming Upstream podcast that was featuring my guy Cameron Meisner. Already got to start culminating ideas for those twenty twenty two Bold Marlins predictions because I'm pretty satisfied with the variety that we covered on this one. Thank you, as always for the support. Remember to leave a rating and review for this pod if you hadn't already, to help us in our donation to support the Player's Alliance covering the Marlins every day here on Fish Strip's I'm Elis Susman, Go Fish Inducted and Inducted intept who infected