Out Of Left Field: Anybody Else Remember Carlos Marmol?

A.K.A. A Player Profile Nobody Asked For…

If you’re a Cubs fan like me you’re probably drinking about the impending rebuild, and a potential return to the losing ways of — well, most of the franchise’s history, ancient and otherwise. So, with the club’s near future as bleak as the rest of the world’s, I thought it’d be a good time to put down my bottle of $12 schnapps and take a look back at the career of one of the more interesting Cubs in recent memory.

Of course, I’m speaking of one-time All-star baseball-thrower-person Carlos Marmol. 

Dude debuted with the Cubs back in ‘06, started for a year, then got sent to the pen where he put up some very, let’s call them, bizarre numbers.

During his prime (‘07—’10) he threw just under 300 times to the tune of a two and a half ERA. Struck everybody out (over 440 in just over 300 IP), and gave up like no hits (guys hit a whopping .155 off him). Pretty elite sh*t if you ask me.

But then you follow your finger down the stat-line, and you discover he did all that walking a rather un-elite 193 and beaning an additional 30. 

In Nerd-Speak, that means every 9 IP he’s giving up around 6.5 free bases. According to Fangraphs 1.5/9’s excellent and around 3’s average. The chart ends with 4 considered awful. (I’ll let you decide what adjective is best to describe 6 or above.)

In Regular-Speak, Marmol was maybe the most bafflingly successful case of wildly effective baseball’s ever seen. Nobody knew where the ball was going when it left his hand. That includes him. There’s an honest case for you — the hitter, stepping up to the plate against young Carlos — to just say, “Fuck it, I ain’t swingin,” and I dare your fictional hitting coach to argue.

So, you ask, how’d he manage to accomplish this?

The answer: Dude had utterly filthy sh*t. As it turns out, perhaps too filthy for his own good. Ask any Cubs fan that had to endure the stress of watching Marmol save a game (by, like, walking the bases full and then, suddenly and without reason, finding enough command to K some dudes and get a weak pop-up or something for the third out): The guy’s slider swept a country-mile. I mean, you try locating a pitch that you’ve got to aim at your third baseman if it’s got any chance of sniffing the zone. Same went with his heater. Sh*t came out his hand muy caliente, with the sort of life you’d best call sentient.

Combine that movement with mechanics that when he’s good are deceptive and when he’s bad are broken beyond any coach’s fixing (seriously, after his leg lift he’d bend his torso forward like a goddamn gargoyle, then explode towards the plate with the sort of whippy arm action I’m pretty sure only Dominicans are born with), and you’ve got the makings of a short-but-grand, and very weird Big League career. 

After the 2010 season his control issues overwhelmed the Ks and H/9 numbers. The Cubs dropped him in ‘13, and he’d bounce around the league for a few years before leaving the game on an unceremonious minor league note in ‘16.

So what do you do thereafter if you’re a jobless, washed up reliever?

You’re absolutely right: You take your millions and move back to the Dominican town you’re from, and there you open a karaoke bar/car wash with pretty decent food. 

Not sh*tting you — that’s actually what he did.

The place, Recta 49, didn’t last (it’s permanently closed, per the Internet), but there’s a little part of me that gets all warm and tingly inside thinking about Carlos Marmol grabbing the mike on a Thursday night karaoke, thanking the crowd for patronizing his establishment dedicated to the marriage of his two favorite things: clean, shiny automobiles and horrible, drunken amateur Billy Joel covers. Then he belts out some track from The Stranger, and the people go nuts like they’d do after he shut the door in the ninth on some rare, winning afternoon at Wrigley Field in the late 00’s. 

He’s probably downed half a bottle of Brugal by then, and his notes might miss their pitch the way some of his pitches used to miss the strike zone, but all that’s forgotten tonight — under this immaculate Carribean moonlight.

Now, you’ll have to excuse me. Somebody’s cutting onions, uh, next door.

Cover photo courtesy of Justin K. Aller/Getty Images.