Marquis Performer
If you’ve seen Baseball Prospectus you may have waded through my overly cute introduction – at minimum you know I am awed by the accuracy of the forecasts of the figure filberts.
But every year, amid the Nostramadus-like exactitude of most of the player line previews, they miss by more than a mile. Last year it was Cliff Lee. This year an early front-runner for the 2009 version is Jason Marquis.
The Rockies’ righthander is now at 8-4, 3.98, 1.34.
BP predicted 6-10, 5.57, 1.61.
This is not to say they could not still come awfully close. The forecast was for 21 starts and 11 relief appearances. Marquis would not exactly have to go up like downtown Chicago in 1871 to go 0-6 the rest of the year, fall out of the rotation after nine more starts, and inflate the ERA by not much more than a run and a half. Manny Parra could offer him instructions.
Still, as I noted in that intro, spooky things do seem to follow when the forecast maximums are reached. Tim Hudson was expected to end up 12-10 last season; he got to 11-7 and then his elbow went blooey. Mr. Marquis is now two wins past where he was supposed to end up.
Baseball Nerd 
Not surprising with Marquis, he was an erratic pitcher when he played for the Cardinals, there was no inbetween for Jason! The question is: will he maintain this pace or will he go south later this year? My Cardinals are stone cold right now so I don’t regard his win against them this weekend as anything but an outlier, just luck because the Redbirds will get out of this slump. (Hear that MO? Get my Cards back on track with some good trades or I descend on your office with a barrel of tar and a sack full of feathers!) (They had 17 year-old Grichuk batting balls into Busch Stadium’s upper tiers last week, boy that kid can hit!)
Yeah, using the Cardinals, even in just a small part, to judge how a pitcher is going right now is a little unfair, since their offense has completely vaporized in the last 4-5 weeks. They couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a boat right now.
Give Jason the rest of the season, and I’m sure he’ll return to his usual form of all-or-nothing on any given day…which was his life stories when pitching WITH the Cardinals.
Give him some time, Keith. Marquis only has four starts at home, and three of those came against the offensively-challenged Astros, Padres and Giants (26th, 27th, and 29th in runs scored, respectively). Don’t get me wrong… I’ll be the first to admit he’s pitched way better than I’d expected (and I say that as a Cubs fan who’s seen most of his starts over the past two seasons) but if I have to pick somebody to implode, Marquis is as good of a candidate as anybody.
damm i think you really have skills…lol
They said Marquis harder than most pitchers.
But I still like it when he play in the field. Make me shout aloud.
Mika from table gigogneÂ