For a good long while Monday night, Reds fans had reason to be encouraged. The team was already off to a strong start, and then it took a lead on the road against the Cubs, with Brandon Finnegan working on a no-hitter. It promptly came undone. Not only did Finnegan not complete the no-hitter — the Reds didn’t complete a shutout, and actually the Reds didn’t even win the damn game, with the Cubs rallying against the vulnerable bullpen. Reality blows, and it probably wasn’t the last time the Cubs will put the Reds away in some kind of dispiriting fashion. In the span of a few innings, Reds fans were reminded that, yeah, the playoffs probably aren’t going to happen.

I mean, I don’t know. The Reds are still 5-2. Bully for them. They don’t seem like a good team, but teams like this have surprised before. I don’t want to step on any playoff dreams, so I’ll go with this: Perhaps my main positive takeaway has been the work of Finnegan as a starter. I don’t think he’ll be pitching this team into October, but he’s pitched like someone who could do that down the road. That young Reds rotation is starting to take some shape.

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Baseball can be slow to change. We’ve had this idea for decades that certain pitch types have platoon splits, and that you should avoid them in certain situations because of it. Righties, don’t throw sliders to lefties! It’s Baseball 101.

Think of the changeup, too. “Does he have a changeup?” or some variation on the theme is the first question uttered of any prospect on the way up. It’s shorthand for “can he be a starter?” because we think of changeups as weapons against the opposite hand. A righty will need one to get lefties out and turn the lineup over, back to the other righties, who will be dispatched using breaking balls.

As with all conventional wisdom, this notion of handedness and pitch types should be rife for manipulation. Say you could use your changeup effectively against same-handed hitters, for example. You could have a fastball/changeup starter that was equally effective against both hands, despite the history of platoon splits on the pitch.

To the innovators go the spoils. And we’re starting to see some innovators.

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On April 6, Darin Ruf went 0 for 3 with a walk in Philadelphia’s 3-2 loss to the Reds in Cincinnati. The right-handed-hitting Phillies first baseman faced left-hander Brandon Finnegan in his first two at-bats. He later stepped into the batter’s box against righties Caleb Cotham and Blake Wood.

Ruf, who has a .943 career OPS against lefties, broke down his four plate appearances a few days later.

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LEAD-IN

“Finnegan likes to throw a lot of fastballs, but I’d never seen him before, so I didn’t know exactly what it looked like out of his hand. I only knew the velocity. From video, I like to get a little bit of mental timing off of a pitcher. I try to see what his pitches do. For instance, is his slider a slider, or is it more of a slurve?

“Going into the game, I wanted to get a fastball middle, middle away. That’s something most lefties try to do. With guys like Kershaw and Bumgarner, who like to pitch on the inside part of the plate, I might have a different game plan. But against (Finnegan), I wanted to stay in the middle, opposite-field area.”

FIRST AT-BAT Read the rest of this entry »

I would be remiss if I wrote an article about a young player showing ridiculous power in the first week of the season and failed to mention Trevor Story. Consider him mentioned! Hand him the MVP and Rookie of the Year already, stop pitching to him, all that. He’s been great. But here’s someone who’s also been great: a 24-year-old shortstop-turned-third baseman for the rebuilding Cincinnati Reds by the name of Eugenio Suarez. He’s quietly hit four home runs in the first six games of the season. That’s a pretty good return, even if we already knew Suarez had the ability to hit for some power based on last year’s 13 homers in 97 games. However, there are some other things that Suarez has done in the early going — and in some cases, not done — that warrant attention from us.

First, a little background. Let’s look at some examples. Suarez first came up for the Tigers in 2014, playing 85 games at shortstop while showing an average walk rate and bad strikeout rate. He hit for a .097 isolated-power mark, which was below his average minor-league ISO but not exactly outside the realm of belief for a guy just making the jump. After watching a lot of examples, this is about a fair approximation of his 2014 swing, from a game against the Royals in late September of 2014:

A bit of an open stance (he seemed to vacillate between a more open stance and an almost square stance during 2014), a short stride and toe tap, and a nice clean single to left field.

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We were talking about something unrelated, so when Joey Votto slipped this quote in, I laughed out loud. You?! Joey Votto? You did what? Listening back to it even made me giggle again.

“I tried to do a lot of pull hitting early in the season and it was an error,” he said, but my mind could barely comprehend in real time. “It was a mistake,” he admitted before I could point out that it was completely out of character.

So why did he try it? “It was me trying to hit more homers. I thought I’d get easy homers.” After the laughter came a sort of stunned silence. The idea that Votto, who has preached going up the middle to himself and the games’ biggest stars for as long as he’s been great, tried to pull a few cheapies into the seats last year was a bit stunning.

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Retirement announcements are seldom surprising, because even from the outside it’s pretty simple to tell when a player has outlived his utility. Willie Bloomquist is 38, now, and after spending the offseason making up his mind, he tweeted the following last Friday:

Make your last swing your BEST swing. Farewell @MLB. Thank you for 14 amazing seasons. It’s been an incredible ride. pic.twitter.com/VuImzqOrSl

— Willie Bloomquist (@williebloom) March 11, 2016

Bloomquist is hanging them up, which means Bloomquist articles on analytical websites must also hang them up. In a way it’s amazing Bloomquist achieved such Internet fame in the first place, being a career reserve, but his name meant a little something over the years, and here, for one last time, I want to talk about what Willie Bloomquist was.

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Baseball has started, sort of, and it’s time to have a meetup. Don’t worry about the team projections, all of our teams are still in it, at least until April. Please come drink, rosterbate, and theorize with the following writers at OHSO Brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, March 11th, at 6pm. Free appetizers for attendees!

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Billy Hamilton did last year what we all were afraid he’d do: not hit. Somehow, despite a .274 on-base percentage, Hamilton managed to steal 57 bases, which is exactly why his shortcomings at the plate can be so frustrating — think of what he could be if he just hit a little. Despite missing some time to a shoulder injury and being one of the 10 or so worst hitters in baseball, Hamilton managed to be worth two Wins Above Replacement, so it’s not like he wasn’t still a productive player for the Reds, what with his elite speed and center field defense. It’s just, a guy can’t run a .226/.274/.289 slash line forever. That will eventually wear thin with any team, regardless of the player’s contributions outside the batter’s box.

So of course, Hamilton wants to get better at the plate — he needs to get better at the plate — and with Hamilton, it seems like it starts with the approach. These last two years, Hamilton’s put the ball in the air more often than Nelson Cruz. He’s put the ball in the air more often than Josh Donaldson, Albert Pujols, Matt Kemp, Evan Gattis and plenty more sluggers whose fly-ball rates, ideally, should dwarf Hamilton’s. Yet, his swing plane seemingly disagrees with his speed and strength (or lack thereof), and Hamilton has mastered the unbecoming art of the harmless fly out.

Jeff Sullivan wrote last year about this phenomenon, and concluded, understandably, that Hamilton needs to do a better job of putting the ball on the ground, and maximizing his strengths. Now, Hamilton has seemingly come around to that idea, and here’s an excerpt from a recent C. Trent Rosecrans article in the Cincinnati Enquirer to support that idea:

Hamilton said he and [third base coach] Hatcher not only worked on the physical approach — his hands, bunting and such — but also the mental side. Hatcher showed him just how many times he hit the ball where, how many times he popped up and to where and why he was and wasn’t being successful.

“We really sat down and went over all that stuff,” Hamilton said. “I have a plan and I just have to put it together.”

And a remarkably candid quote, from later on:

“I’m going to bunt way more than I did last year.”

Hamilton desperately wants to be Cincinnati’s leadoff hitter, and understands that he’ll have to raise the OBP in order to remain at the top of the lineup. To raise the OBP, he’ll have to change his game, and the way to achieve that goal seems to be clear: more balls on the ground.

Except, here’s a quote from a Mark Sheldon piece during Spring Training last year:

Price would also like to see Hamilton take advantage of his speed by hitting more line drives and balls on the ground instead of lifting them into the air. That would include more bunting.

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Well, a new team, for starters. What Jay Bruce is missing is a new team. Rather, a new team is missing Jay Bruce. Twice now, the Reds have reportedly been on the verge of trading Bruce. First, to the Mets at last year’s trade deadline, more recently to the Blue Jays, just last night. Twice, Bruce has reportedly been on the verge of being dealt, and twice, the deal has fallen apart.

Maybe that tells you something about Jay Bruce. Or maybe it tells you something about the other players in the deal, as both deals collapsed due to medical hangups concerning the players whom the Reds were attempting to acquire. In July, it was the Reds who backed out of the proposed deal that could have netted them Zack Wheeler, in the midst of his recovery from Tommy John Surgery. Last night, it wasn’t even Michael Saunders‘ bum knee that gave the Reds pause.

Neither proposal fell apart because of Bruce, specifically, but that doesn’t mean the failed deals don’t tell us something about Bruce, because they do. What they tell us about Bruce is this: thus far, teams have only appeared willing to give up already-injured players for him.

Which is shocking, given where Bruce’s career was just two years ago. Just two years ago, he was a 26-year-old Gold Glove-caliber right fielder who doubled as one of the game’s most prolific home run hitters. Now, the Reds are struggling to rid themselves of his salary for anything more than damaged goods.

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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