Overhed

STANTON IMAGE NOT AVAILABLE! MARLINS 3-1! You better get on this quick or Mike is going to destroy your reputation on these boards.

Nice job Mike! ... and we never saw Maybin again.

HIP HIP!

Chris is the man dude. I would've beaned 8 straight batters after that BS walk call.

f*** YEAH!

Where the hell did that miss?

What a beautiful emergency swing.

Come on Chris, don't let this a-hole ump rattle you.

OMFG, please don't with the Rays announcers! I knew I couldn't be the only one who thought they were extremely obnoxious. The worst was them whining about Helms' at-bat where he "struck-out looking on a perfect pitch" and then hits a home run. Like umpires don't miss borderline strike calls ALL the time.

Volstad looks great thus far. Let's hope he keeps pounding the sinker low. *fingers crossed*

This Ray's defense is really giving our offense fits. I think I feel an ulcer starting to take form.

So, you are telling me that 1) the Marlins don't need to get better or 2) you are comfortable with Volstad and Nolasco? I think what they're saying is that we've seen enough young pitchers in recent seasons come up and get pounded back down (Sean West, Ryan Tucker, and some other guys I can't remember) that we'd rather stick with what we've got for now. I think our SP isn't horrible. I'd rather have a young rookie like that come out of the bullpen then be a starting pitcher.

Soriano vs Stanton reminded me way too much of Maybin's struggles with strikeouts and offspeed pitches. Thats my issue with "rushing" Stanton. He didn't have at-bats like that in Double A. Maybe sometime in Triple A would have given him some work with that. Soriano just showed the entire Major Leagues how they should be pitching to Stanton right now. Sounds like trouble to me. I agree with this. Mike is taking way too many good offspeed pitches early in the count. Some of them hangers that he should put in the seats. I'm sure the guy can hit a breaking ball, he just needs to tweak his approach. I'd be surprised if he's gotten more than 2 fastballs in the zone pitched at him in his few games so far. The game overall was pretty frustrating. The Rays played great defense, we could easily have put up 2 or 3 more runs considering how well we hit their pitching. It was great to see Nate Robertson go in there and do a great job against a quality hitting lineup. Without him the game would have probably been over by the 7th inning. Finally, I really miss Bake. Paulino's OBP is brutal.

Really sad to see Bake go, he's such a clutch hitter and we all know Paulino is not going to hit at a .300 clip the whole year.

Wow, what a shot.

SHAKE AND BAKE!

Little tip, pick up the OS full minors rosters from the roster vault, much better than the rosters sony is putting out and has all the minor league players, and better rating for the Fish. Yea but even that screws us over. Have you seen Mike Stanton's rating? What are you talking about? He's rated an A prospect. What do you want, him to be major league ready when in real life he's not major league ready? You can rate anyone an A prospect, it doesn't take into account how far along they are. Stanton is pretty far down in that respect. Yeah, but how many big-league games has he been in? There are countless prospects who have great success in the minors, and for one reason or another, only become average players in the bigs. You don't think if the club knew Stanton was going to belt 30 HRs they would call him up immediately? I think his ratings are fine. Either way, if you feel that he's rated too low, you can just manage your roster (either while in your franchise mode, or while in the main menu) and edit his attributes.

I know this sounds crazy, but Coghlan's defense has looked really solid this year. He's made some jaw-dropping plays and always gives 100% effort on defense. I think this is enough to keep him in the lineup for at least another month before sending him down or benching him for a while.

I thought JJs 10 Ks in 6 innings was very encouraging, especially after his K numbers in his previous 2 starts. Also, I know it's early, but Maybin is showing that he belongs. It's very comforting to know that if Cogs struggles we can move him down to the 8th spot and have Maybin and Bake, in the 1 and 2 holes.

We have 1 more game tomorrow against the Reds tomorrow, don't we? I really liked Bake in the 2 spot, he's really clutch. Also it was great to see BC go 3-4 with a Triple away from the cycle. If Maybin struggles or Cogs keeps struggling, it's good to know we've got a solid backup plan.

Cogs and Maybin better watch their backs, might be riding pine if BC has anything to say about it.

I created an album over at imgur (site is so awesome, didn't even have to make an account) with the screenshots. Here's the link: http://imgur.com/a/B...he_show_ratings These are based on the "Live" online rosters posted 4/12/10 (they post roster updates every Monday). A few things to note (first of all our bullpen sucks -- compare to the Dodgers and the Phils), Pinto is our 2nd best RP (excluding Leo, who's better but is under the "Closing Pitchers" category), however, I posted a screenshot of his attributes and you can see his BB/9 rating is horrible. It's just that he doesn't get hit a lot and doesn't give up many homeruns, that and the break on his changeup is just filthy (I think it's almost maxed). I took a SS of some of the Hopper's attributes for comparison. I also posted SS of Hanley, JJ, Cantu, and Jose Reyes. You'll see that offensively Hanley trumps Reyes in every category, it's just that defensively Hanley is extremely underrated. I think the root of the issue with the ratings for the Marlins is that the game's ratings engine uses the last 3 years (probably a weighted average) to rate the players. Hanley was very good last year but pretty bad the year before that, and pretty horrible a couple of years ago. Anyway, as an MLB The Show fanboy I'll note that these ratings are pretty moot, as every year a group of guys on OperationSports.com essentially re-rate all the players in the Majors and fill all the minor league rosters with the real minor league players! Using scouting reports and other resources. Needless to say, I waited until their rosters came out to start my franchise.

anyone got pictures of the whole marlins roster with their ratings. i'd like to see the bullpen ratings to see if they portray how bad our pen actually is I'll try to do this later tonight when I get home. I can tell you that Sony San Diego has something against numerical ratings, you can only see these when you edit an individual player. Instead they show a horizontal bar which represents the rating from 0 - 100. Nevertheless I'll try to compare the Marlins to some other bullpens and clubs so you get an idea of how they compare side by side. About the Rankings, you should know these are not arbitrary values given to each team. They are based on the individual players (including the bench), position by position, and how they stack up against all the other teams. Also, this game is the best baseball sim ever made.

I found it comforting to see our offense wake up after they were dominated on Sunday. It was tough watching Ricky get knocked around a bit. It looks like most batters focused on being aggressive early in the count, they know if they fall behind, they're toast, they also know Ricky pounds the strike zone. It seems like one of those things where Ricky may want to pitch a bit backwards the 2nd time and 3rd time through the batting lineup. Then again, he's had great success pounding the strike zone, it just seemed like yesterday he wasn't quite hitting his spots. All in all we were one ball 4 away from winning the game, which is frustrating but there were many positive aspects that we can build on, especially bullpen performance. We'll get 'em tonight.

Let's see if Cogs can start turning it around tonight.