Every year we go through the same routine. A previously unimpressive player has a couple great months and we wonder if we’re observing something new and meaningful or if it’s simply random variation and the regression monster is coming. I haven’t done a thorough analysis, but I’d imagine a larger percentage of articles written on sites like this during the first months contain the sentiment “This sure looks new and interesting, but it’s just too early to tell.”

Frequently, we don’t follow up on these analyses. There’s simply too much going on throughout the game and there usually isn’t much to add to the original article other than thumbs up or down. Last year, one such article that actually merited a follow-up was this one concerning Zack Cozart’s best 40 games. After three seasons of well below-average offense, the slick-fielding shortstop was crushing the ball into late May. I pointed out that Cozart seemed to have developed a new approach that generated harder contact and more pulled fly balls, which was supported by some comments by Cozart himself regarding a conversation he’d had with Barry Larkin during Spring Training.

Three weeks after the article appeared on the site, Zack Cozart suffered a nasty right-knee injury and was sidelined for the remainder of the season. That meant I would have to wait more than a full calendar year to approach a sufficiently large sample to determine if Cozart had really improved or if we were looking at some well-timed good fortune. Thirteen months after Cozart’s knee gave out, we have our answer: Zack Cozart can hit.

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Most All-Stars weren’t born into baseball this way. Most of them had to alter their approach, or their mechanics, in order to find that a-ha moment. They threw a pitch differently, or decided to pull the ball more, or changed their swing, and then found a run of sustained success that put them in the All-Star game that’s being played tonight.

So, given fairly fettered access to the All-Stars from both leagues, that was the question I posed: what was the big adjustment, mechanical or approach-wise, that brought you to this podium today?

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Jay Bruce is going to be traded. That’s a near-certainty. He’s the only player on this year’s market to be (almost) traded not once, but twice by the team for which he still plays. The rumors have been persisting for more than a year now. Bruce is in the last guaranteed year of his contract, the Reds were never in contention, and he’s rebuilt his value with a great first half at the plate. Already, we’ve heard Bruce linked again to the Blue Jays, alongside the Indians, Nationals, Dodgers, and others. It will be an upset if he finishes the season wearing a Cincinnati uniform.

That much about Jay Bruce, we can be confident. We can be confident that he’s been a good hitter in the past, we can be confident that he’s been a good hitter in the present, and we can be confident that he’s likely to be moved within the next month. There exists an area of Bruce’s story that’s far more murky, though, and one’s perception of that area of Bruce’s game goes a long way towards one’s evaluation of Bruce. Despite a 120 wRC+ this season, Bruce has been worth 0.0 WAR, according to our calculations and 0.4 WAR by Baseball-Reference’s, and that’s all due to his defensive numbers.

The defensive numbers hate Jay Bruce this year. Ultimate Zone Rating calls him the season’s worst defensive right fielder, among 21 qualifiers. Defensive Runs Saved has him in a tie for last, with J.D. Martinez. Those negative marks stretch back a couple years now, but then you get recent tweets like this from Jeff Passan:

Bruce is 29 and has very reasonable club option at $13M for 2017. D metrics don’t like him, but two scouts say he’s avg to slightly > in RF.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 1, 2016

And quotes like this out of Buster Olney columns:

Bruce’s defensive metrics are not good, but some scouts believe that he’s better than those numbers indicate, and wonder if his skills are properly reflected in the stats — which some evaluators believe may be inexact.

And you begin to sense a divide on the evaluation of Bruce’s defensive ability. And it’s an important divide, because a Bruce with average-to-better defense is a useful player. A Bruce closer to what the defensive metrics suggest is a replacement-level designated hitter. Those two players fetch far different returns in a mid-season trade.

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Jay Bruce’s tenure with the Reds has reached the kids in the back seat asking “Are we there, yet?” stage. It feels like he should have been traded a while ago, yet here is, again a trade target and again a player Cincinnati can move to help its rebuilding process. The team has a $13 million option on Bruce for next year, so they theoretically still control him for another year and a half. That said, now is really the time the Reds need to trade him.

Figuring out when the Reds could have traded Bruce isn’t difficult. Determining if they should have is more so. Jay Bruce signed his current contract back before the 2011 season. The deal guaranteed him $51 million, buying out his arbitration years and potentially three years of free agency. The Reds were coming off a division-winning season, and while the 2011 season was disappointing, the team made the playoffs in 2012 and 2013. Heading into the 2014 season, the Reds had reasonable expectations of contending.

That edition of the Reds featured one of the best players in baseball, Joey Votto; a still decent Brandon Phillips; a nice, young player in Todd Frazier; and promising guys like Devin Mesoraco and Billy Hamilton, who were potentially ready to step forward. With a rotation of Johnny Cueto, Mat Latos, Homer Bailey, Mike Leake, and Alfredo Simon — and Tony Cingrani with Aroldis Chapman in the ninth — the team looked like it might have a decent shot at postseason contention. At the very least, there wasn’t the obvious need to blow things up and rebuild. The 2014 season proceeded to become a bit of a disaster, however. Votto got hurt, Phillips got worse, Bailey and Latos couldn’t pitch full seasons, and Jay Bruce had the worst year of his career, putting up a wRC+ of 78, a 40-point drop from his previous four seasons.

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Last night, Kris Bryant became the first player in Major League history to hit three home runs and two doubles in the same game. His offensive barrage was part of a five homer attack by the Cubs — Jake Arrieta and Anthony Rizzo also went yard last night — in their 11-8 win over the Reds. But while Bryant’s game was indeed spectacular, we also shouldn’t be too surprised that it came in Cincinnati, because the Reds staff is allowing dingers like no pitching staff in baseball history.

Through 77 games, the Reds have allowed 129 home runs, 23 more than any other team has allowed this season. That works out to 1.7 homers allowed per game, a pace that would shatter the all-time record for home runs allowed if the Reds were to keep serving longballs at this rate. The title of the most homer-prone pitching staff in history currently belongs to the 1996 Detroit Tigers, who allowed 241 homers, or a rate of 1.5 homers per game. They edged out the 2000 Royals, 2001 Rockies, and 1999 Rockies, all of whom were attempting to pitch during the height of baseball’s “Steroid Era”, when home run records were falling left and right.

To break the record, the Reds would have to allow 113 home runs over their remaining 85 games, a 1.3 home run per game pace that would be somewhat formidable for most pitching staffs. But for this particular group of hurlers, it’s actually not that hard to imagine them breaking the record.

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When Cody Reed takes the mound on Saturday he’ll likely be wearing the same pair of rec specs he’s worn since his sophomore year of high school. Reed donned the glasses after he had a hard time picking up signs from his catcher — especially during night games — as a freshman and has continued to wear them as a pro. Though, when Reed is pitching well, it’s opposing hitters who look like they could use a pair.

Reed was a late second-rounder out of Northwest Mississippi Community College in 2013. At the time the industry thought there was a good chance he’d just end up as a reliever. There was arm strength, there was an above-average slider, but the strike-throwing and changeup were both behind, and Reed’s firebrand mound presence had many considering him a potential closer. Now the velocity remains but the slider, and Reed’s usage of it, has improved — as has the changeup. He still has some issues throwing strikes, but things have progressed enough in that area that instead of his control dictating whether or not he starts or relieves, it’s going to dictate just how good of a starter he’s going to be.

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Collectively, Reds pitchers have been all sorts of terrible this year. Their team ERA (5.45) and FIP (5.62) are both easily the worst in baseball, as injuries to Homer Bailey, Raisel Iglesias and Michael Lorenzen have left their rotation painfully thin. It’s about to get better, though, as top prospect Cody Reed is set to make his big-league debut tomorrow. Since we’ve likely passed the Super Two deadline, he should be up for good.

Reed enjoyed a breakout season in 2015, when he posted an impressive 24% strikeout rate and 2.93 FIP between High-A and Double-A. That was enough to make him a fixture on prospect lists last winter. He placed in the middle third of most top 100 rankings.

Reed built on last year’s success at the Triple-A level this year. Although he’s faced better competition, his strikeout and walk rates have remained on par with last year’s numbers. The end result has been a 3.20 ERA and 3.37 FIP. Not bad at all for a 23-year-old facing borderline big-league hitters.

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If you woke up this morning, looked at the WAR Leaderboards for position players and saw Mike Trout, Jose Altuve, and Manny Machado near the top, you might have had an inclination that all is right with the world. After all, those three players are some of the very best in major-league baseball, and we would expect to see them at the top of the list. Of course, when you look closely at the leaderboard, it’s important to note that there are 171 qualified players. To regard the WAR marks as some sort of de facto ranking for all players would be foolish. For some players, defensive value has a large impact on their WAR total, and it’s important, when considering WAR values one-third of the way into the season, to consider the context in which those figures.

“Small sample size” is a phrase that’s invoked a lot throughout the season. At FanGraphs, we try to determine what might be a small-sample aberration from what could be a new talent level. Generally speaking, the bigger the sample size, the better — and this is especially true for defensive statistics, where we want to have a very big sample to determine a player’s talent level. Last year, I attempted to provide a warning on the reliability of defensive statistics. Now that the season has reached its third month, it’s appropriate to revisit that work.

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It doesn’t take much with the bat for Billy Hamilton to be a great player. He’s a world class defensive center fielder. Of course he’s a world class base-runner. Just between his defense and base-running, Hamilton can be worth like something up to three wins without adding anything at the plate, and the list of major-league players with that kind of ability is a short one.

Problem is, Hamilton hasn’t just added nothing at the plate, he’s subtracted, and last year he took those subtractions to a nearly unbearable level. Hamilton was one of the very worst hitters in 2015 with a 52 wRC+ that’s either right at or perhaps even below the lowest acceptable level for any hitter, regardless of what other contributions he offers. Hamilton was teetering on the verge of wasting his preternatural athletic abilities due to what he could (or rather couldn’t) do at the plate.

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If you hit 10 home runs in 15 games for an awful, last-place team, will anyone notice? What if you hit 10 home runs in 15 games after entering the season with just eight major-league homers to your name — will anyone notice then? These are the questions Adam Duvall is asking the baseball world right now. While spending his first season as a major-league regular in the relative baseball obscurity that is 2016 Cincinnati, the 27-year-old Duvall is suddenly begging the baseball world to take notice. Well, we see you, Adam, and we want to get to know you better.

Power has always been the key component to Duvall’s game. He has 130 career minor-league home runs, most of which came during his time with the Giants organization. In June 2014, during Duvall’s major-league debut, he homered off Reds pitcher Mike Leake. Just over a year later, the Reds traded Leake to the Giants and in return received none other than Adam Duvall in return. As a September call-up for Cincinnati last fall, Duvall made an early case for the 2016 everyday left-field job, recording five home runs in just 72 plate appearances. This spring, he officially won the job over guys like Jake Cave, Scott Schebler, and Kyle Waldrop. So far, it sure looks like the Reds made the right decision.

Duvall’s current hot streak is part of a larger season-long trend of tremendous power-hitting — historically tremendous power-hitting, even. Of his 50 hits this season, 31 have been of the extra-base variety — 17 home runs and 14 doubles – which gives Duvall a 62.0% extra-base hit rate. In the modern era (since 1901), only two players have posted a higher XBH/H% over a full season: 2010 Jose Bautista (62.2%) and, naturally, 2001 Barry Bonds (68.6%).

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