David Huzzard: Slow start has Marlins fishing for answers

It's still very early in the baseball season, too early to count any team out or call into question anyone's spring training predictions, but the Marlins have the worst record in baseball and could be on the verge of changing managers. One of the main reasons for this is that Marlins starting pitching is not very good. They came into Wednesday's action sporting a 5.30 ERA, with Dan Haren their best starting pitcher so far. If people weren't so enamored with the Marlins outfield and paid attention to Miami's starting staff, they might have known this was coming.

The Marlins made a lot of moves during this past offseason, but none of them made them particularly better. In fact the series of trades that, in essence, exchanged Nate Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney for Mat Latos and Haren made the Marlins starting staff worse. Latos has been viewed for much of his career as a top-of-the-rotation pitcher, while in reality not being much better than an above-average starter. Coming off a season affected by injuries, Latos should not b expected to return to his 2013 form.

In 2014, Latos had something in common with most of the Marlins starting staff. Whether it was due to injury or simple ineffectiveness, Latos had trouble striking out batters in 2014. This is something else that all the other Marlins starters struggle with, as well. In an era where no hitter is worried about striking out, some of them doing so at a record-setting pace, it is hard to find a pitcher with below seven strikeouts per nine innings, but the Marlins found an entire rotation full of them.

Henderson Alvarez (who is currently on the DL with a shoulder injury) came into 2015 sporting a career K/9 of 4.76. Jared Cosart has a career K/9 of 5.51 and Tom Koehler is at 6.61. In other words, the Marlins put together a pitching staff of non-strikeout pitchers in the era of the strikeout. There are certain pitchers that can outplay a low strikeout rate or have a specialty pitch, like Doug Fister and his sinker, but these types of pitchers are rare and in no way the norm. In other words, it would be a bad idea to build an entire rotation of non-strikeout pitchers hoping that the majority of them become Fister when in reality the majority of them have careers like John Lannan.

The starting rotation isn't entirely to blame for the Marlins' slow start. Both Christian Yelich and Marcel Ozuna are off to a slow starts. Both are very talented players, but it is rare that a player follows up a breakout season with a season of equal measure. Some drop-off should be expected. The slow start of the two other outfielders shouldn't worry the Marlins. They are young, talented players and will come around. The players that aren't so young anymore that are off to slow starts should trouble the Marlins. Michael Morse and Martin Prado are both in their 30s and finished off 2014 looking like they were ready to transition into back-up roles. The Marlins decided that they could still be full-time starters. Both are off to bad starts with the bat and have less of a chance of coming around than Yelich and Ozuna.

A poor start in April is by no means the end of the world, but the Marlins starting rotation and infield weren't good before the season started. With Alvarez already on the DL, that lack of depth has already reared its ugly head. The Marlins made a lot of moves this past offseason, but none of them made them significantly better than the 79-win 2014 squad, and losing Eovaldi and Heaney in favor of Latos and Haren may have made the Marlins worse. The Nationals are still going to have to deal with the Marlins, and they will pull out of this skid at some point and could even finish above .500. The Marlins have a lot of promising, young talent but picking them as a playoff team in 2015 was a year too soon.

David Huzzard blogs about the Nationals at Citizens of Natstown. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidHuzzard. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our regular roster of writers.