Series Preview: Florida Marlins @ Seattle Mariners

Seattle: 24-45
Marlins: 37-32

GAMES

Game 1: Carlos Silva vs Andrew Miller*
Game 2: Felix Hernandez vs Scott Olsen*
Game 3: R.A. Dickey vs Ryan Tucker

Andrew Miller is throwing balls 40% of the time and has lost his groundball ratio. In short, he's nothing like the pitcher he was profiled as as little as a year ago. He's facing a bit of a velocity drop, but nothing significant so that's good news for his shoulder and core, but the loss of control points to a possible elbow issue.

Scott Olsen has received some press this season for his turn around, but once again it's a case of the media following the traditional stats and then applying hackneyed cliches to his "improvement" instead of digging deeper. Olsen is throwing more strikes and allowing fewer line drives, but he's missing the same number of bats and generating the same percentage of groundballs. Has he improved? Yes. But the big push of his improvement in the stupid stats comes from a BABIP that has gone from an unsustainably high .341 to an unsustainably low .224.

One possible repercussion of Bavasi's firing is that it hopefully sends a clear message that 2008 is over, which means giving Dickey an extended look in the rotation to see if there's anything worthwhile there.

Likely Starters:
C Matt Treanor
1 Mike Jacobs*
2 Dan Uggla
S Hanley Ramirez
3 Jorge Cantu
L Luis Gonzalez*
C Cody Ross
R Jeremy Hermida*
D Alfredo Amezaga^

Florida doesn't do much, but what they do do, is power with a team isoP of .195 they are pacing the senior circuit ahead of the Phillies (.188) and then a big gap to the third best team. They lead the lead in homeruns, but also in striking out and are near the bottom in drawing walks and on base percentage. This offense has the makings of one that will go fishing so we could see some good games from Felix and Dickey provided that Felix doesn't pitch like an idiot and Dickey shows more movement on his knucker than last Friday.

CONTEXT

Finally an embarrassing (if you're still rooting for the team) sweep leads to an unexpected front office change. There's nothing more to say here at the moment though that isn't being said elsewhere.

THIS SERIES BROUGHT TO YOU BY:

Lia Fail
Inveralond. Perth, Scotland

I've never had it, but it seems appropriate no?

It's a bitter from Scotland that has a full malty aroma and taste according to reviews. It actually ranks quite well with a noticeable bitter palate and a dark brown color.