Nobody can definitively say whether the Reds will be sellers at the trade deadline this year. At 33-38 and near the bottom of the National League Central, they certainly look the part of sellers. Their Pythagorean record is quite a bit better than that, but they’re well back of the Brewers and Cubs and drifting away from the Wild Card slots. They have several guys on the roster playing out the final years of their contracts, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if they sold. If so, one of the players plenty of teams will be interested in David Hernandez.

You’d be forgiven for not grouping Hernandez with the game’s best relievers. His 4.50 ERA is below league average, and though he’s had a solid career, he’s never been one of the game’s premier late-inning arms.

However, glance past his surface numbers, and he starts to look a little better.

That’s a list of some of the most feared relievers in the game, and Hernandez’s name is right there with them. His elite FIP stems from his ability to keep the ball in the park. He’s allowed just two dingers in 32 innings, good for the 13th-best HR/9 ratio in baseball. That would be his best mark since 2012, but it isn’t far off from the 0.65 HR/9 figure he posted in 2017 or his 0.84 mark last season.

Hernandez is also generating plenty of strikeouts. His 11.8 K/9 ratio represents something of a breakout, or at least a resurgence. He was an elite strikeout pitcher back in 2012, when he punched out 98 hitters in 68 innings and posted a 2.50 ERA and a 2.08 FIP. He traded a few strikeouts for ground balls in the years following, as he struck out a still-solid 9.3/9 from 2013-18. In 2019, the strikeouts are back, and he’s again exceptional. Read the rest of this entry »

On the heels of five straight losing seasons, the last four with at least 94 losses, the Reds are at least relevant and interesting again. Despite a 29-35 record entering Tuesday, their +33 run differential is the league’s fourth-best. Luis Castillo is showing signs of developing into an ace. Derek Dietrich is fighting off bees and retrograde broadcasters. Yasiel Puig is entertaining even when he’s not hitting, Michael Lorenzen sometimes plays the outfield when he’s not pitching, and top prospect Nick Senzel has arrived. And now, finally, Joey Votto is starting to heat up.

For the second season in a row, Votto has started slowly. On the heels of his 36-homer, 6.5-WAR 2017 season, a few frosty weeks to start 2018 (his age-34 season) could be easily dismissed, but the full-season lows Votto wound up setting in batting average (.284), slugging percentage (.419), wRC+ (131), home runs (12), and WAR (3.5) look considerably more ominous in light of his current line (.256/.347/.379, 5 HR, 93 wRC+, 0.2 WAR), which looks bad until you peep at his stats through May 10: .206/.333/.333 with three homers, an 80 wRC+, and -0.1 WAR.

As noted, the now-35-year-old Votto is showing signs of life. In his past 23 games and 106 PA, he’s batting .316/.377/.432 for a 115 wRC+, which isn’t exactly Votto-esque, but it’s a significant uptick within an offense managing just an 81 wRC+, the worst of any non-rebuilding team. Of his 15 multi-hit games this year, nine of them have taken place in that span, including all three of his three-hit games. This past weekend against the Phillies, he went 5-for-12 with a pair of walks, a homer — his first to the opposite field this year, off Zach Eflin — and a game-tying two-run single off Jose Alvarez in Sunday’s victory, Cincinnati’s only one of the three-game series. Here’s the homer:

As Votto noted after that shot, “I’ve been thinking my swing has been coming around since the beginning of May. I know I had some rough stretches, but it’s a very good sign. I haven’t done that yet this year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —Colten Brewer, David Hernandez, and Ryan Yarbrough — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

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Colten Brewer, Boston Red Sox

“It started happening in the [2016] offseason that I got Rule-5’ed to the Yankees. When I got to spring training, they said, ‘Hey, the reason we got you is that we noticed some cut on your fastball; we like that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I’d been five years with the Pirates, and they didn’t really use that analytical side to baseball. As a result, I didn’t really know much about myself until I got with the Yankees.

“That offseason I’d worked out at a place called APEC, in Tyler, Texas. They were using a Driveline system. Going to a new team, I wanted to show up in spring training in the best shape possible, so I spent a month and half there. That’s where the wheels started turning.

“In the spring, I started throwing more balls in to lefties, and was watching the ball work. From then on I started having natural cut on my fastball. I said, ‘I’m going to use this.’ With the Pirates I’d been more of a sinker guy — I thought arm-side run was better — but after I got to the Yankees I started ripping fastballs as hard as I could, and they were cutting. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball teams continue to search for whatever edge they can find when it comes to bringing cheap, talented players into their organizations. The draft is one of the easiest ways for teams to accumulate talent, as clubs take turns picking the best amateur players in the country, and the Commissioner’s office, as authorized by the CBA between the players and owners, tells teams how much they are allowed to spend. Most amateur players have very little leverage, and generally sign for the recommended slot amount. Because individual draft picks receive a slotted amount, but teams are allowed to spend their entire draft pool in whatever manner they choose, money often gets moved around pick-to-pick, with those players with less leverage receiving much less than the slot amount for their pick while those players with some leverage getting quite a bit more. This year, the Reds, Mets, White Sox, and Marlins all appear to be moving significant money around in an effort to manipulate the draft system to their benefit. Is it worth it though?

While every team moves money around in the draft, these four clubs stood out for drafting hard-to-sign prep players in the early rounds, then taking college seniors with multiple picks later in the first 10 rounds. Presumably, the college senior picks will sign for amounts significantly under their slot value (you can find all the slot values here), meaning the savings can be used to sign the prep players who threatened to go to college if their bonus demands are not met. Here are the teams, players, slot amounts, and the number of senior signs for each team.

All four players are likely to require more than their draft slot provides in order to sign a contract with their drafting teams. Tyler Callihan has reportedly agreed to a deal for $1.5 million. Allan is rumored to have an asking price of about $3 million, which might be why the Mets selected seniors with seven picks in the first 10 rounds. The slot for Evan Fitterer is pretty low, requiring the Marlins to make sacrifices with many of their subsequent picks. We don’t yet know exactly what it will take to sign all of the players listed, but we do have an idea of how much value teams gave up in later rounds, as well as the expected value of the players who were picked. Read the rest of this entry »

“You have to be good to be a hot dog,” said Pirates play-by-play broadcaster Greg Brown during Tuesday night’s Reds-Pirates contest, quoting Dock Ellis to conclude an anecdote about the May 1, 1974 start in which the Pirates’ free-spirited righty intentionally drilled the first three Reds he faced. In illustrating the long and oft-heated rivalry between the two teams, Brown appeared to arrive at an epiphany regarding the home run celebrations of Derek Dietrich — a subject of unhealthy fixation that had dominated an often cringeworthy broadcast while clumsily recapitulating the game’s generational culture war. The 29-year-old utiltyman had just clubbed his third dinger of the game, fourth of this week’s series, seventh in eight games against the Pirates, and 17th overall, the last a career high and a total tied for fifth in the majors.

Dietrich, who spent six years toiling for the Marlins before being designated for assignment and released last November (stellar personnel management there, Jeets), isn’t a player over whom opponents generally obsess. Beyond being a bat-first type whose defensive versatility depends upon certain levels of tolerance, he’s earned a reputation as something of a cut-up. In the minors, as a member of the Double-A Jacksonville Suns in 2013, he put on a display of his juggling skill that progressed to as many as five balls, then to bowling pins, literal machetes, and flaming torches:

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Stephenson looked done. After a rocky 2017 (4.68 ERA, 13.8% walk rate), he pitched poorly enough in 2018 spring training that the Reds sent him down to Triple-A Louisville. A vote of no confidence from the Reds, of all teams, is a bad sign for a pitcher. In 2016, the Reds finished 30th in pitching WAR; in 2017, they finished 29th. As Stephenson toiled in Louisville, Reds pitching wasn’t setting the world on fire — the 2018 team finished 26th in WAR, allowing more home runs than every team in baseball other than the Orioles.

When Stephenson returned to the majors at the tail end of 2018, things looked grim. In four appearances, he compiled a 9.26 ERA with more walks than strikeouts. His control, always a limiting factor, looked like it might be his undoing — even in a serviceable Triple-A season, he’d walked 12.2% of the batters he’d faced. As 2018 came to a close, the Robert Stephenson story seemed nearly written. Stuff-first pitching prospect can’t harness his command and never makes good on his promise? Seen that one before. As 2018 was Stephenson’s last option year, he started 2019 in the majors, but time very much felt short.

To understand why Stephenson’s middling major league career was something more than just a journeyman starter’s struggles, you have to look back to his prospect pedigree. In 2015, Kiley McDaniel rated him as the top Reds prospect. In 2016, Stephenson slipped all the way to second. At each turn, though, he showed every tool imaginable. His fastball touched the upper 90s. His curveball was drool-inducing. His changeup wasn’t quite there yet, but you could dream on it. He scuffled in a September call-up in 2016, but for the most part, he looked the part of a future impact arm.

If that was the whole arc of Stephenson’s career, it would be just another cautionary tale about toolsy high school pitching prospects. Sometimes all the stuff in the world isn’t enough, you could tell yourself. Player evaluation is hard! But fortunately for the narrative, that’s not where the story ends. The Reds had to find a place for Stephenson on their 2019 roster, so they turned to the bullpen. Control-challenged starters, after all, are often just relievers waiting to be discovered. What has Stephenson done with the opportunity? Here are the top five relievers this year when it comes to getting swings and misses.

Swinging strike rates this high mostly just look like random numbers, but stop and think for a minute about what this means. A quarter of the pitches Josh Hader throws result in swinging strikes. Not a quarter of the swings — a quarter of the pitches. Stephenson isn’t far behind with his 21.6% rate, and that’s almost as wild. If Stephenson throws five pitches, one is getting a swing and a miss. Hader is a game-breaking curiosity, a mythical bullpen beast who strikes out half the batters he faces and swings playoff series. Robert Stephenson had a 5.47 career ERA coming into this season, and there he is in second place.

Sometimes, relievers are easy to spot. Take a two-pitch pitcher who needs a little velocity boost. Give them an offseason to work on throwing with maximum effort. There you have it, a reliever in a can. So did Stephenson add three ticks to his fastball and start maxing out that wipeout curveball scouts loved so much? Well, yes and no, but mostly no. Stephenson has added a pinch of velocity this year, but he’s not a completely remade pitcher or anything. In 2017 and 2018, his four-seam averaged 93.1 mph in starting appearances. In 2019, he’s dialed it up to 94.2 mph. Maybe he hasn’t gotten a huge velocity boost from relieving, but it’s still something.

When it comes to a secondary pitch, though, Stephenson has made a change. In his 2016 debut, he threw a fastball two thirds of the time, mixing in changeups and curveballs in roughly equal measure. In 2017, he threw a slider for the first time. The pitch was more of a power curve than anything else, thrown with a curveball grip and wrist action closer to a fastball, and it immediately became Stephenson’s best pitch. Batters whiffed at nearly half of the sliders they swung at; not too shabby for a pitch he’d never thrown before.

By 2018, Bob Steve had made the slider his go-to pitch, and analysts noticed. Though he didn’t record many major league innings in 2018, he threw 40% sliders when he did. Of the 99 sliders he threw, 18 drew swinging strikes, a 40% whiff-per-swing rate that beat anything he’d ever done with his curveball. The fastball/slider combination still didn’t produce great results that season, but the bare bones of an impact reliever were there; a decent-velocity fastball, wipeout secondary stuff, a willingness to throw a ton of secondary pitches.

That fastball, however, it’s fair to say wasn’t ready for prime time. By FanGraphs’ linear-weight pitch values, his fastball has been 38 runs below average in his career. It’s hardly better using Pitch Info classifications, at 34 runs below average. These linear-weight pitch values take balls in play, strikes, and balls into account, but the problem with Stephenson’s fastball is pretty straightforward — when batters swing at it, they destroy it. This isn’t a one-year thing, a small sample artifact, or anything benign like that. Every year he’s been in the majors, his results and expected results on contact have been objectively awful.

As you can see, the fastball has been quite poor, even in 2019. Given how much his fastball has been shelled, though, Stephenson’s 2019 is even more impressive. He has a 3.96 ERA and a 2.56 FIP despite a fastball that essentially turns every batter into Cody Bellinger. How has he pulled off that trick? Well, he stopped throwing fastballs, that’s how. Take a look at the qualified relievers who have thrown the most sliders this year.

Want to limit the damage done on fastballs and leverage your excellent slider? Sometimes the solution is pleasingly straightforward — throw as few fastballs as possible, and replace them one-for-one with your best pitch. This play only works in relief, as you can’t exactly throw 60% sliders as a starter, but his slider is so good that even when batters know it’s coming, they can’t hit hit.

Stephenson’s slider is gorgeous when he throws it out of the zone. Jung Ho Kang surely has sliders on the brain here, but still bends the knee.

Keston Hiura manages to get the bat on the ball, but only barely, and the result is the same.

These are the kinds of sliders that end at-bats, and Stephenson is adept at hunting strikeouts with the pitch. He’s getting whiffs on 56% of swings against his slider, a frankly mind-boggling number. But as well as the slider plays as an out pitch, that’s not the only thing Stephenson uses it for.

When Stephenson first developed his slider in 2017, he used it in the way most pitchers use sliders. It came out late in counts as a hammer, a pitch that looked like a fastball early before falling off the table late. While he dabbled with it early in counts, it was largely a pitch to be used while ahead. This year, that dalliance with early-count sliders has become a full-blown romance. Stephenson is throwing sliders to open at-bats 62% of the time in 2019. If the count gets to 1-0, he still goes to his slider 43% of the time. 2-0? Still 42% sliders. On 2-1 counts, Stephenson throws 70% sliders. He’s using the pitch in every situation, whether it’s a traditional slider count or not.

This adjustment is a stroke of genius for someone who can’t afford to let batters tee off on his fastball. As a batter facing Stephenson, you desperately want to avoid a two-strike count, because a two-strike count against Stephenson’s slider is a sure way to end up in a Pitching Ninja GIF. Best, then, to swing at an early fastball. It’s the pitch you want to hit, after all. The next step in that game theoretical confrontation is for Stephenson to throw sliders in fastball counts, and either throw enough for called strikes or be deceptive enough that batters can’t just leave the bat on their shoulders.

Amazingly enough for a pitcher who came into 2019 with a 13.6% career walk rate, Stephenson has pretty good slider command. He’s locating 45% of his first-pitch sliders in the zone, enough that hitters can’t wait him out. His overall slider zone rate of 46% is comfortably better than average (43% for the big leagues as a whole). When he does miss the zone, he’s missing close — he already has nine swinging strikes on out-of-zone sliders to start at-bats this year, the most of any reliever and only three behind slider factory Patrick Corbin for most in the majors.

Though he throws the slider in the strike zone less often than his fastball, the slider has proven to be more effective at managing counts. For his career, he’s located 52% of his fastballs in the zone to open at-bats, a slim lead over the slider. The pitch generates almost no out-of-zone swings, though, which undoes the edge he gets from having more pitches in the zone, and that’s before we even get to what happens when batters do swing. When batters swing at fastballs, they might hit them, and with Stephenson’s fastball, you don’t want that. Take a look at Stephenson’s first pitch outcomes, both in his career prior to 2019 and in 2019.

Those balls in play are mostly fastballs, and letting batters put first-pitch fastballs into play isn’t where you want to be when your fastball is as flat as Stephenson’s. Emphasizing the slider has moved all three results the way you’d like to see them move, and even if it’s a small sample size, it’s encouraging to see such promising first-pitch numbers. The league as a whole has a .364 wOBA after a 1-0 count and a .267 wOBA after 0-1. Those 13% of plate appearances that Stephenson has moved from the 1-0 or in play bucket to the 0-1 bucket are like facing Brandon Drury instead of Ronald Acuña 13% of the time — that’ll do nicely.

Maybe you’re a skeptic. Maybe you think that anything can happen in 25 innings, that the dead can walk and a minor leaguer can look like an effective reliever, if only briefly. Maybe you’d prefer to point to Stephenson’s 3.96 ERA and say that even if this is a new skill level, a high-3 ERA reliever hardly merits a deep dive. I don’t see that, though. I see a celebrated prospect who was legitimately not good enough to stick in the major leagues by doing what he’d done his whole life. I see that celebrated prospect making up a new pitch on the fly, throwing that pitch 60% of the time, and excelling in the major leagues with it. Robert Stephenson was a cautionary tale, and now he’s an impact reliever with a hellacious put-away pitch he can throw in any count. In what has so far been a frustrating Reds season, it’s great to see a former prospect make good.

The combination of power and command has been striking. In 34 innings split between high-A Dunedin and Double-A New Hampshire, Nate Pearson has punched out 52 batters and issued just six walks. His ERA sits comfortably at 1.32. Blessed with a blistering fastball and a carve-‘em-up slider, he’s the top pitching prospect in the Toronto Blue Jays organization.

The 22-year-old right-hander doesn’t possess a long professional resume. Selected 28th overall in the 2017 draft out of Central Florida Community College, Pearson got his feet wet with 20 innings of rookie ball, then began last year on the injured list with an intercostal strain. Upon returning in early May, he was promptly nailed by a come-backer and missed the remainder of the regular season with a fractured ulna.

Pearson recovered in time to make six appearances in the Fall League, an assignment Jeff Ware, Toronto’s minor-league pitching coordinator, called “a big test given that he’d really only pitched in short-season ball.” In terms of reestablishing his high-ceiling credentials, he passed with flying colors.

Standing a sturdy six-foot-six, Pearson looks the part of a power pitcher, and that’s exactly what he is. Asked for a self-scouting report, he led with that exact definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Aside from the cool 1911 denim throwback uniforms worn by the home team, Sunday’s Giants-Reds game was a relatively conventional affair. The Reds ran up a 4-0 first inning lead thanks in part to a three-pitch, three-homer sequence, Luis Castillo threw some devastating changeups but also gave up a game-tying three-run homer to Buster Posey, and the Giants won, 6-5. Zzzzz, right? Monday’s game, on the other hand, featured several different flavors of wild, all of them worth savoring. Twenty years from now, somebody will do an oral history of this game, and ESPN will air a 30 for 30 feature.

Let’s start with the bees. More bzzzz than zzzzz…

You thought I was kidding? A swarm of ’em delayed the start of the game by 18 minutes, perhaps a message from above about those weird wraparound series, where teams play Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday just to mess with peoples’ circadian rhythms. Or something.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday was a rollecoaster for Reds righty Luis Castillo. At Great American Ballpark, he needed just 32 pitches to set the Giants’ starting nine down in order for the first time, faced the minimum number of hitters through five innings, and didn’t allow his first hit until he’d gotten one out into the sixth — all while staked to a four-run lead. Before he could escape the frame, however, he allowed a walk and two other hits, including a game-tying three-run homer by Buster Posey. Given that he’d thrown just 81 pitches to that point, manager David Bell sent him back out for the seventh. He put up a zero, and left with the game tied, but the Reds lost, 6-5. Bummer.

The outing cost Castillo his lead atop an NL ERA leaderboard that at first blush appears to be drunk, with guys like Kyle Freeland (5.90 ERA),Yu Darvish (5.79), Aaron Nola (5.06), and Noah Syndergaard (5.02, even after Thursday’s heroics) stumbling along while Zach Davies (1.56), Castillo (1.97, up from 1.45 after his previous start), Caleb Smith (2.00) and Jordan Lyles (2.20) shine.

A closer look at the 26-year-old Dominican’s numbers shows that his spot there is no fluke. Castillo has shaken off last year’s sophomore slump with a performance reminiscent of his tantalizing 15-start rookie season from 2017, asserting his spot among the majors’ upper echelon of starters. Prior to Sunday, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start this season, a performance that earned him NL Pitcher of the Month honors for April. In 50.1 innings though Sunday, he’s second in ERA, strikeouts (59), groundball rate (57.8%), and WAR (1.4), fourth in strikeout rate (30.3%), fifth in home run rate (0.54 per nine), and sixth in FIP (2.89).

Recall that Castillo, who was originally signed out of the Dominican Republic by the Giants in 2011, and traded to the Marlins in 2014 and the Reds in 2016, was effectively treated as a lottery ticket in deals that respectively sent Casey McGehee and Dan Straily the other way. He was also dealt to the Padres and back again in a mid-2016 pair of trades that centered around whether San Diego had been forthcoming regarding Colin Rea’s elbow issues.

Though renowned for a fastball that could reach 101 mph, he cracked only one major prospect list, placing 94th on that of ESPN’s Keith Law in the spring of 2017. Law graded his changeup as plus but noted that his third pitch was a fringy slider. Baseball America, which placed him second on its Marlins list that same spring but still shy of its Top 100, praised his easy velocity, projected his slider as above-average, and noted that “he has a feel for a power changeup, but he’s still finding the right grip. It has the potential to be an average pitch as well.” Our own Eric Longenhagen, who had Castillo 10th on Cincinnati’s 2017 list, described the slider as flashing plus and the changeup as ” below average but there’s good arm speed here (that should be obvious, this guy bumps 100) and it could get to average with reps.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It all started with what I thought was an innocuous tweet.

The Reds released outfielder Matt Kemp on Saturday, and I sent a tweet with a few sabermetric stats — wRC+, WAR, and xwOBA — from his 2019 season. A few hours later, actor Chad Lowe (the brother of Rob) quote-tweeted my original post remarking that, and I’m paraphrasing here, analytics are ruining baseball. (The actual tweet contains profanity, but here it is if you’d like to see it.) My mentions filled up from there, and my original tweet ended up getting ratio’d by baseball fans who do not care for advanced stats. Lowe’s tweet started a new debate over the prevalence of sabermetric stats in mainstream baseball analysis, and it all played out in my notifications tab.

Since Saturday, Lowe and I have found a point of similarity, that being that there are some unquantifiable factors that go into the construction of a winning baseball team. It was a crazy few hours on Saturday night, to say the least.

Of course, I think we all know which side of the “saber v. Traditionalist” debate I fall upon, so this article isn’t going to be a further discussion about that. What I actually want to get into is the topic that prompted this whole debate: Kemp. Read the rest of this entry »