Just six months ago, Raisel Iglesias was everyone’s favorite starting pitcher breakout candidate for 2016. The 26-year-old Cuban, signed for seven years and $27 million by the Cincinnati Reds in 2014, was coming off an impressive rookie campaign in which he struck out more than a quarter of all batters faced as a starter while exhibiting above-average command and a knack for getting ground balls, and he only got better as the year went on. Iglesias, alongside Anthony DeSclafani and John Lamb, was perhaps the most enticing pick of a trio of young Reds starters who have all provided us a painful reminder of the fickle and painful nature of choosing pitching as a profession.

DeSclafani spent the first two months of the season on the disabled list with a strained oblique. Lamb’s experienced decline across the board. And Iglesias hasn’t made a start since April, and last week earned his first career save.

Iglesias’ status update informs us of two important developments. The first being: everyone’s favorite starting pitcher breakout candidate for 2016 has been a reliever for the last two months. That’s disappointing, because fans want their exciting young starting pitchers to be start. The bullpen is rightly viewed as a downgrade. The fact that Iglesias earned a save, though, at least suggests that he’s been effective out of the bullpen, and effective might be an understatement. In 28 relief innings this season, Iglesias has allowed just two earned runs — good for a Britton-like 0.64 ERA — while striking out nearly 30% of the batters he’s faced.

The Reds made the switch in an effort to keep Iglesias healthy by limiting his workload, and also to provide stability to a bullpen that’s still among the worst the expansion era has ever seen. Thus far, Iglesias has thrived. He’s thrived, and beyond that, he’s expressed satisfaction with his new role. In early July, Iglesias told Cincinnati reporters through a translator that he “thinks [he doesn’t] want to go back and be a starter again” and that he wants to “start thinking about continuing [his] career as a closer.” Now, that time is here, and so the Reds have an interesting decision to make.
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Exit velocity! We love it! Sorry for shouting. But we do! We love to sort the leaderboards, and we love to write articles using the information gleaned from those leaderboards. This is one right here! Beat writers love to tweet the exit velocity when a player they cover dongs a dinger, and even the folks who don’t always love the application of exit velocity in the public sphere agree that its tracking can only mean positive things for the future of our understanding of the game. Exit velocity: it’s for the people. Can you believe just a few years ago we didn’t have this stuff?

We have it now, and for as little as we have grasped about the subject, it’s intuitive that the higher the average exit velocity, the better. Hard-hit balls can go for home runs, and home runs are the best. In first place on this year’s average exit velocity leaderboard is Nelson Cruz. Good hitter. In second place is Giancarlo Stanton. Good hitter. Third place? Mark Trumbo. I’m on a word count, so I’ll stop here. You get the point. Good hitters having good seasons are hitting the ball hard, and that should surprise no one.

There’s a flip side to that leaderboard. Some bad hitters are having bad seasons and hitting the ball not-hard. The guy with the lowest average exit velocity and more than 200 balls in play is Billy Hamilton, who’s averaged just 83.3 miles per hour on his batted balls. Hamilton’s having a fine season, overall — he’s projected to finish the year right around +3.0 WAR thanks again to his elite defense and baserunning — but we’re now nearly 1,500 plate appearances into Hamilton’s career, and it’s beginning to look like the bat might wind up being more Alcides Escobar than the league-average production we all dreamed on when Hamilton broke into the league.

But that’s not going to stop me from writing about Hamilton. Because even though we might like to see what happens were he to hit the ball harder, there’s a lesson to be learned from when he hits it softly. Kudos to you if you already see where this is going.

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I’m not really in the business of piling on. We know the Reds haven’t been very good, and we knew the Reds weren’t supposed to be very good. They are openly rebuilding, and while rebuilding teams don’t get to completely neglect the big-league product, it’s not really the priority. We all know how this works. And, say, wouldn’t you know it, but since the calendar flipped to July, the Reds have actually won more games than they’ve lost! Good for them. It would be nice to see the bad teams rise perhaps quicker than they ever thought possible.

There’s just something I can’t let go by, not without calling attention to it. The Reds, overall, have been bad. They’ve been bad in large part because their pitchers have been bad. Here are the month-by-month WARs for the Reds’ collective pitching staff:

• April: -1.4 WAR
• May: -1.3
• June: -0.8
• July: +1.8
• August: +0.1

They don’t seem to add up so cleanly, but if you look at the full-season statistics, Reds pitchers have combined for -2.1 WAR. Unsurprisingly, that’s the lowest mark in baseball — the Angels are second-worst, at +3.0. It seems like the Reds might have last place sewn up. But let’s step beyond just 2016. Let’s look at forever? Here are the worst team pitching staffs since 1900, according to FanGraphs WAR and FanGraphs WAR alone:

WAR is just one measure. I know. It doesn’t get everything perfect. I know. It does do a lot more right than wrong. And according to WAR, these Reds could end up being the worst pitching staff in modern baseball history. No team yet on record has rated below replacement level. That’s where the Reds are, underwater by a couple of wins, and while July suggested they could pull themselves out of this and get a breath of fresh air, there’s work to be done. The Reds have 52 games to go, assuming they play them all. They don’t necessarily need to pitch well. They just need to pitch better, or else they could rank as the worst anyone’s seen. That’s something to avoid. That’s something to play for!

Homer Bailey has returned. That’s a plus for the Reds. Alfredo Simon is on the disabled list, and J.J. Hoover is in the minors, and those are both pluses for the Reds. Quietly, Anthony DeSclafani has been super effective. The Reds should have the arms they need. As I look, the Reds are projected the rest of the way for +3.7 pitching WAR, which would get them out of…the…red, so to speak. But if nothing else, just know what’s already happened. The Reds pitchers have been historically lousy. You might’ve suspected that to be true, but it always helps to confirm. Or, maybe, it helps nothing at all.

Seemingly every season, a baseball team scores noticeably more runs that we think they should. I’m not talking about teams that perform better than their preseason projections, but rather the teams that manage to score a lot more runs than their actual in-season numbers suggest they should. If we’re using the shorthand, I’m talking about teams who score more runs than their BaseRuns calculation supports.

Whenever you point this out regarding a specific team, you’re likely going to be met with skepticism. Some of that skepticism is very justified, as no single model (such as BaseRuns) can explain the real world perfectly. But some of the skepticism is less justified and devolves merely into a group of local fans suggesting that you don’t respect their team. At its core, this is usually going to be an argument about sequencing — or, as it’s sometimes known, clutch hitting. Is the team in question simply having a string of good timing or are they actually doing something to impact the order of their events?

History tells us that the answer is usually the former, but alternative hypotheses are always worth exploring. One of this season’s examples, the Reds, break the mold a bit. Instead of being a decent offense that’s scoring more than a decent number of runs, this year’s clutch kings are one of the worst offenses in baseball but are managing to look respectable given excellent timing.

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I awoke to the news of the Jay Bruce trade’s initial iteration, one that included Brandon Nimmo, a prospect on whom the industry is, at best, lukewarm. The new version of the deal is headlined by Dilson Herrera who, because of the number of plate appearances he’s recorded in the big leagues, is technically not a prospect anymore. But he played in this month’s Futures Game and has spent all of 2016 in the minors and writing one more scouting report after this trade deadline won’t bring me any closer to insanity than I’ve already come, so let’s talk about Dilson Herrera.

Herrera signed as an international free agent out of Colombia with Pittsburgh back in 2010. He received a $220,000 bonus. In 2013, he played in his first Futures Game before becoming part of the Marlon Byrd waiver deal later that August. Herrera reached the big leagues at age 20 and has had brief stints with the Mets during each of the past two seasons.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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Going into this trade deadline season, you might have thought that the Mets could use a fifth starter, or a center fielder with good glove and bat combo, or a third baseman, but instead they went and got another corner outfielder when they traded 22-year-old infielder Dilson Herrera and another minor leaguer for the Reds’ Jay Bruce.

Since the Mets have an affordable $13m option on Bruce next season, it may be a look ahead in case Yoenis Cespedes opts out of his contract. But in the meantime, Bruce makes for an uneasy fit on this roster. Sort of. Because he’s also perfect for the team, in that he’s just like the rest of the team. He makes them more like themselves.

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University of Nevada CF and member of the USA Collegiate National Team T.J. Friedl is expected to sign a lucrative NDFA (non-drafted free agent) deal with the Cincinnati Reds. Friedl, a redshirt sophomore in 2016, was eligible to be drafted in June but, due to confusion with how he was listed on Nevada’s roster, the industry — and, rumor has it, Friedl himself — was unaware that he was draft-eligible. Only once Friedl began to make waves this summer with Team USA did scouts begin to look into his background and realize that he had slipped through the cracks and was eligible to sign.

Of course, NDFA’s that sign for over $100,000 count against the signing club’s draft bonus pool and as bidding for Friedl began to heat up, many teams had no room to make a run at him. The Reds had around $700K worth of money to spend without incurring heavy penalties for exceeding their pool limit, and indeed I’ve heard anything from $500-$750K as the likely amount here, with more sources indicating the number is toward the low end of that range. Tampa Bay was also heavily involved in negotiations with Friedl.

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You’ve undoubtedly heard about the Chapman blockbuster by now. Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen gave his take on the prospects involved. Below, I outline what my newly revamped KATOH projection system thinks about the youngsters headed to the Yankees. I also go on to compare that group to the group the Yankees sent to Cincinnati last December in exchange for Chapman’s services.

Note that I’ve included two types of KATOH projection. KATOH denotes the newest iteration of my projection system, outlined yesterday. KATOH+ denotes a version of that same thing which also accounts for Baseball America’s prospect rankings.

*****

Gleyber Torres, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 5.6 WAR
KATOH+ Projection: 7.1 WAR

Although he’s just 19, Torres has been one of the more productive hitters in High-A this year. The Venezuelan shortstop is slashing .275/.359/.433 on the year, with an impressive nine homers and 19 steals. In addition to his offensive exploits, Torres plays an uber-premium position and plays it well.

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Last week, I wrote about the disproportionate impact a disastrous April can have on our perceptions of a player. The example I used then was Ken Giles, who has largely put an awful first month of the season behind him and returned to being a dominant reliever. Now seems like as good a time as any to talk about another player who struggled mightily in April: Joey Votto.

As Owen Watson pointed out at the time, April was the worst month of Votto’s career. His slash line was an almost unfathomably awful .224/.320/.306. Votto is one of the precious few who fall into the category of perennial MVP candidates and, for better or worse, those players can’t post a 62 wRC+ through the first month of the season without generating countless inquiries to the effect of “What’s wrong?” or “Is this the start of his decline?” or “Hoo boy, just how bad is that contract?” However, if you’ve been watching the Reds this season, you (a) have my condolences and (b) can confirm that Joey Votto is, in fact, still Joey Votto.

The hitters over the past 30 days who’ve recorded a better wRC+ than Votto can be counted on one hand. His recent hot streak has helped catapult his season stats back to their expected level. He has resumed his rightful spot among league leaders in walks, trailing only Bryce Harper among qualified hitters in walk rate (17.2%). His .404 on-base percentage ranks third in the National League. His poor April is still depressing his season line somewhat, but he’s currently batting a reasonably Vottoian .271/.404/.475 with a 134 wRC+. Here’s his rebound in graph form:

Sure, he’s not reaching the astronomical heights of his phenomenal second half a year ago, but he has clearly managed to climb back towards his expected level of production. Now that we’re firmly back in a world where we don’t have to imminently ponder the mortality of one of the game’s best hitters, there are two questions worth asking: 1. How did he rebound? and 2. Is he really back in a sustainable way?

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