As we all know, the DFS world is without one of the most fun players to pick in just about any slate – Giancarlo Stanton – who is out with a hand injury. That leaves the Marlins with a few decent players, but mostly a ragtag group of hitters. Obviously, this is bad for the outlook of the Marlin bats and potentially good news for opposing pitchers, but to what degree?
Giancarlo also missed a portion of the 2014 season toward the end of the year due to injury and the Marlins were without him for most of the month of September. Since the Fantasy Labs tools weren’t available then and are now, I thought it would be fun to apply different filters to that Marlins team, which will potentially give us insight on the Marlins going forward.
Believe it or not, the Miami Marlins bats finished the 2014 season with an overall Plus/Minus of +0.33 by DraftKings scoring. This was good enough for sixth place in the league in the category. Strangely enough, pitchers facing the Marlins in 2014 added 2.74 points to Plus/Minus, which placed second in the league. That may seem contradictory, but remember Plus/Minus measures how a player performs against his projection based on salary. Players with low salaries can still outperform their expectations without having great games in general.
With that baseline set, let’s take a look at the data when Giancarlo was not in the lineup. Pitchers facing the Marlins during the end of the 2014 season added 4.07 points to Plus/Minus. This represents 1.33 points of added value in comparison to the Marlins’ full strength numbers. In these games, opposing pitchers met or exceeded their projected points in 12 of the 17 games. Here were the top performances:
Recalling that the Marlins finished the 2014 season overall adding 0.33 points to Plus/Minus, let’s see what happened when they didn’t have Stanton in the lineup.
Ouch. Keep in mind that these Plus/Minus figures aren’t team totals; the Marlins as a team aren’t finishing at -0.57. The -0.57 applies to every batter that matched the criteria, or in other words, every Marlins bat that played in a game without Stanton in the lineup. Just how bad are those numbers? Here were the worst teams by Plus/Minus over the entire 2014 season:
If the Marlins had played every game without Stanton at the same level of production, they would have finished as the worst team in the league in Plus/Minus. These figures are all based on data from the 2014 season. In the offseason before the 2015 season, the Marlins added Dee Gordon, but kept the majority of their bats from 2014. Below are their team ranks from a few important offensive categories by season and they do not instill much confidence that the Marlins are in a position to outperform last season’s dreadful Stanton-less numbers.
| Season | Runs | Home Runs | Strikeouts |
| 2014 | 16 | 24 | 3 |
| 2015 | 24 | 21 | 7 |
