The Reds entered the off-season with two possible paths forward:

1. Trade Joey Votto for a bushel of young players and accept a consolidation while breaking in the foundation of their next core group of everyday players.

2. Trade some of those young players for roster upgrades in an effort to win while they have Votto under contract.

They choose the second path, shipping Yonder Alonso and friends to San Diego for Mat Latos, sending Travis Wood to Chicago for Sean Marshall, and then using most of their remaining budget allowance to sign Ryan Madson to a one-year deal to take over as the team’s closer. While Latos offers both present and future value, the other moves only upgrade Cincinnati’s roster for 2012, and next winter, they’ll have a tough time retaining Madson, Marshall, and Brandon Phillips while also paying Votto the significant raise that his contract calls for.

So, the Reds are something close to being all-in on this season. If they win, they might create enough extra revenue to give Votto a long-term mega-contract and keep their franchise player. If they don’t win, however, then they’re going to have a hard time selling Votto on re-signing, and they’ll have to explore moving him before he can leave via free agency. That’s not a good scenario, and so the Reds should be highly motivated to maximize their positive outcomes in 2012.

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This off-season, Major League teams forced a quality group of proven closers into a game of musical chairs. There were too many guys with ninth inning experience on the market and not enough jobs to go around, which directly led to Ryan Madson‘s decision to take the last available closer’s job by signing a one year deal with Cincinnati. Madson’s move to the Reds likely closed the door on Francisco Cordero’s ability to return to his prior team, and now that the music has stopped, he finds himself as the guy without a home.

It’s no coincidence that Cordero is the odd man out, however – his current employment status is simply a reflection of the fact that his performance last year threw up a ton of red flags about how much longer he’ll be an effective high leverage reliever.

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Walt Jocketty and his Cincinnati Reds have signaled to the baseball community that they believe the NL Central to be ripe for the taking in 2012.

The organization has been extremely bold this offseason. They opted to leverage several of their young, valuable assets — namely Yonder Alonso, Travis Wood, and Yasmani Grandal — to acquire Mat Latos and Sean Marshall, in hopes of complementing a potent offense that posted the fourth-best team wOBA in the league last season and catapulting the team into the postseason.

Cincinnati ratcheted up that aggressiveness even further on Tuesday evening by inking closer Ryan Madson to a one-year, $8.5M contract.

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Barry Larkin is largely expected to answer a phone call Monday afternoon and hear from Jack O’Connell, Secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America, that he has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The BBWAA has voted at least one player into Cooperstown in every season since 1996, and Larkin has the best chance of anyone on the ballot this year.

However, that congratulatory phone call is not guaranteed. The long-time Cincinnati Reds shortstop must accumulate another 12.9% of the votes to jump from the 62.1% he garnered last year to the necessary 75% for induction, and the average percentage gained by the last twelve players inducted into the Hall of Fame (not in their first year of eligibility) once reaching the 60% threshold was only 10.8 — which would leave Larkin on the outside looking in for yet another season.

Even if Larkin does follow that trend, though, and only receives 72.9 percent of the vote this year, it seems inevitable that we will eventually be talking about Barry Larkin the Hall of Fame shortstop. And we should be.

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According to Ken Rosenthal and Jon Morosi of FOX Sports, the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds are conferring about a possible deal that would send left-hander Sean Marshall to Cincy in return for fellow-southpaw Travis Wood. It is not immediately clear if other players are being discussed as a part of the deal.

Though no trade has been agreed upon as of yet, the move would significantly help both teams within the context of each organization’s blueprint for future success.

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The Reds and Padres swung a mini-blockbuster today, with Mat Latos heading to Cincinnati in exchange for four players: first baseman Yonder Alonso, catcher Yasmani Grandal, and right-handers Edinson Volquez and Brad Boxberger. We’re all familiar with Volquez because he’s been around a while, and Baseball America recently ranked Alonso, Grandal, and Boxberger as the Reds’ third, fourth, and tenth best prospects, respectively.

Rather than look to fill specific needs — which some felt the Royals did when they traded Zack Greinke to the Brewers last winter — it appears as though the Padres just took the best package of talent they could find. There’s a lot going on here as far as the San Diego is concerned, so let’s break it all down…

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The Cincinnati Reds had an abundance of redundant prospects and a big need to upgrade their starting rotation, so their plan for this off-season was obvious to nearly everyone. They needed to combine a group of good young talents who were blocked from playing regularly and turn them into one high quality starting pitcher. After kicking the tires on nearly every available arm on the market, the Reds finally got their wish today, shipping a quartet of good young talents to San Diego in exchange for 24-year-old Mat Latos.

Let’s start with what the Reds are getting in Latos, who is probably the best fit for their team of any pitcher rumored to be available on the market this winter. During his first two years and change in the Majors, Latos has been one of the better pitchers in baseball. For comparison, here are the starters who have thrown at least 350 innings in the last two years and have posted strikeout rates between 23% and 25%.

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No! Not this Joe Jackson! Oh well, he’s alright too. The early stuff, at least.

Ol’ Pete Rose seems to work on a lunar calendar. Because like any holiday based on a lunar calendar — such as my favorite: Chinese/Lunar New Year — I seem to hear about him every year, at a different time each year, and sometimes twice a year, inexplicably. Oftentimes, he reminds me gently — like a lapping tide reminds the sand of rain, which the Mayans had no concept of 2013.

Anyway, I recently stumbled into a Rob Neyer column concerning said Pete Rose, wherein Neyer discusses the disgraced hitsman and the possibility that Bud Selig will reinstate him.

Frankly, I don’t care too much about Ol’ Rosey. Yeah, he leads the world in hits, but he certainly doesn’t lead the game in wOBA or wRC+ — in fact, depending on the plate appearances requirement, you might find him thereabouts of page 14 on that particular dispay (one sorted by wRC+, that is). To me, that screams empty batting average.

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You can set your watch to it: Every year after the MVP awards are announced, people complain about who got — or didn’t get — votes. We SABR nerds at Fangraphs are no different. But, of course, we look at things a little differently. With that in mind, here are some SABR-darlings who haven’t gotten a single MVP vote in five years — and why that might not change this year.

First things first, though. We need a metric by which to measure player production. Since this is Fangraphs, we’ll use WAR as the measuring stick. I’m using a five-year range because most MVP voters will have had some exposure to advanced metrics during that time.

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On Tuesday, we took a quick look at the competitive balance in the MLB, and I made the claim that baseball may have more parity than most leagues, but it also has want of greater balance. During the course of the piece, I made this statement:

The NFL has decided it wants payroll to have essentially no impact on winning, so teams basically trot out the same amount of money every Sunday and hope their money was better-spent. Is that what the MLB wants?

Aft’wards, Paul Swydan pointed out to me that indeed NFL salaries are not flat. Despite their hard cap, their hefty revenue sharing, and their tight spandex pants, the NFL still exhibits nearly a $77M gap between the biggest and lowest payroll — impressive, but still nothing compared to the MLB:

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