In some ways, this Reds season has turned out exactly like we expected. Way back in February, I worried that Cincinnati wouldn’t have enough offense to compete in 2014, and that the season would be a disappointment. It wasn’t hard to see why, really. Take a team that was 15th in wRC+ in 2013, replace Shin-Soo Choo’s elite on-base skills with the huge question mark of Billy Hamilton, do absolutely nothing else other than add the mediocre Skip Schumaker and Brayan Pena to the bench, have Brandon Phillips and Ryan Ludwick get another year older, and watch the offense collapse.

That’s what happened! Sort of. The Reds are 29th in wRC+, saved from last only by the Padres, and are probably going to lose more games than they have since 2008, but it hasn’t happened in exactly in the way we might have thought. Hamilton has been good enough. Joey Votto and Jay Bruce, the only two Reds hitters you could have counted on entering the season, have had disaster years. Devin Mesoraco and Todd Frazier have had breakout campaigns. The end result is still bad, just a different kind of bad.

You can see the same thing on the pitching side, too, just in the other direction. A good, deep rotation was expected to be a strength, and it has. Homer Bailey had finally put it all together in 2013, earning himself a rich contract extension, and a full year of Tony Cingrani seemed fascinating. But Bailey, dealing with a bulging disk in his neck, made only 23 decent starts before undergoing flexor tendon surgery. Cingrani was a huge disappointment, dealt with shoulder issues and hasn’t been seen in the bigs since June. Mat Latos didn’t make his first start until June thanks to elbow trouble, then made only 16 before being shut down earlier this month with — wait for it — elbow trouble.

This shouldn’t be a good rotation. By one measure, it’s arguably been the best rotation. We should talk about that.

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One of the more fascinating stories of last winter was the Cincinnati Reds’ intention to replace the departing center fielder Shin-Soo Choo with the completely unproven Billy Hamilton. While it obviously made sense that Cincinnati had no intention of paying Choo anything like what he got from Texas — a move that looks great right now — they were also subtracting Choo’s .423 OBP from a lineup that had been merely middle-of-the-pack even with him. It’s not entirely a stretch to say Choo’s presence was the biggest part of why Brandon Phillips had suddenly looked so good last year. Phillips declined in nearly every way between 2012 and 2013 then saw his RBI total jump from 77 to 103 in large part because he was hitting behind Choo’s .423 OBP, rather than the out-making ways of Zack Cozart and Drew Stubbs.

That being the case — and because Cincinnati’s main offseason acquisition was the inexplicable decision to give Skip Schumaker two guaranteed years — most of the discussion around Hamilton centered om whether he could get on base enough to take advantage of his fantastic speed. He wasn’t going to match Choo’s OBP, of course, but could he even get on base enough to stay in the big leagues, or to avoid being a one-man out machine out of the leadoff spot? To his credit, after a tough start, he has been more part of the solution than the problem — especially if you can forget he took the worst swing in the history of baseball.

His OBP is at least around .300, which isn’t good, but isn’t the .250 that some of us —  myself included — feared it might be. He’s shown a little bit of power, with six homers. While being caught 21 times on the bases is unacceptable for a player with his speed, that’s the kind of thing that can be eliminated with experience, and he’s still added a considerable amount of value on the bases. He’s a below-average hitter, but that can be tolerated as long as he’s not a complete disaster of a hitter. And he hasn’t been. He’s probably the best candidate in a weak National League Rookie of the Year class.

But while we were spending so much time talking about whether Hamilton would hit, and how many bases he could steal, it was easy to forget he was about to become a major league center fielder. For the first four years of his career, he was a middle infielder. He first played center in 2012 during his stint in the Arizona Fall League. Now that we’ve seen him in center for nearly an entire season… hey, this might just work out. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospects are babies. They’re eagerly anticipated, they’re evaluated by their ceilings, their arrivals are memorable and frequently painful, and these days they’re traded for goods less than ever. They continue to be interesting for a handful of months, but then they start to develop into more fully-formed people, and the magic of limitless possibility disintegrates. Sometimes they turn into remarkable things, more often they turn into unremarkable things, and regardless, it doesn’t take long before they’re taken for granted. Toward the beginning, everything is celebrated. Later on, mistakes aren’t so novel, they aren’t so easy to explain away.

Javier Baez still counts as a prospect, even though his big-league career is weeks underway. He’s among the most exciting prospects we’ve seen in baseball in some years, and though it’s a certainty that he’ll be less compelling a year or two from now, at the moment everything he’s involved in can be turned into a highlight. If he were a real baby, all his activity would be posted on Facebook. Some people might already be getting Baez fatigue, but I’m not one of them, and even if I were, I’d probably make an exception for a showdown between Baez and a similarly extreme sort of pitcher. A pitcher like, I don’t know, Aroldis Chapman. Who Baez faced for the first time on Wednesday night in the top of the ninth of a close game.

Earlier this season, people paid a lot of attention to an at-bat between Kenley Jansen and Miguel Cabrera. It was compelling, because both Jansen and Cabrera are extremely talented. Chapman vs. Baez is compelling because both players are extremely powerful. There’s no one who throws harder than Aroldis Chapman. There might be no one who swings harder than Javier Baez.Who wouldn’t want to watch them go head-to-head over and over? They haven’t yet gone head-to-head over and over, but they have gone head-to-head once. Let’s put that at-bat under the microscope.

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The player with baseball’s third-best wOBA started on Tuesday, and the first time he came up, he drilled a low-away curveball into center for a single. The next time, behind 0-and-2, he fought off an inside fastball and lifted another single into center. The third time, he yanked a low slider down the left-field line for extra bases. I’m taking a risk by writing this post before the game is fully over, so perhaps there’ll be a fourth time, and maybe that’ll go well and maybe it won’t. No matter the outcome, it’s hardly the most important data point.

The most important data point is this: Right now, the best hitter in baseball has been either Mike Trout or Troy Tulowitzki. To round out the top five, you’ve got a selection, including names like Andrew McCutchen, Edwin Encarnacion, and Devin Mesoraco. Four of these players named are known to be amazing. Mesoraco’s been amazing; he’s just not known for it yet.

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I understand the lot of you are preoccupied with thinking about the imminent trade deadline. I understand some might think I write about Aroldis Chapman too much. But Chapman is maybe the funnest pitcher in baseball, so I wanted to take a moment to share a fun fact that has to do with what people don’t talk about when they talk about Chapman and his unparalleled skills. You can go right back to thinking about the deadline in a few.

The Chapman story, of course, is about his fastball, of course. People who hardly know anything about baseball know that Chapman throws the baseball faster than anybody else. It’s the kind of fact that appeals to both die-hards and casual come-and-go sorts, and the heater makes every Chapman appearance a spectacle. After every pitch he throws, all eyes in the ballpark turn toward the radar-gun display. There’s injury concern when Chapman throws a heater slower than his body temperature. Chapman is crazy specifically because people can’t imagine squaring up a fastball at 100+ miles per hour. You think of Chapman and you think of whiffs, because the fastball seems downright unhittable.

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The most unfair thing to imagine in baseball is Aroldis Chapman learning a knuckleball. The next-most unfair thing to imagine in baseball is Aroldis Chapman learning a changeup. This year Aroldis Chapman got around to learning a changeup, and things got weird. When we last checked in on June 19, batters had attempted 14 swings against the change, and not a single one of those swings had made any kind of contact. Later that day, Pirates batters attempted two more swings against the change, and both of them whiffed. So, at one point this year, through 16 swings, Chapman’s changeup had a contact rate of 0.0%. That’s a low rate that put Chapman’s change among the league leaders.

I thought it would make sense to check back in, now that more than a month has passed. I’m fascinated to no end by the idea of Chapman throwing an offspeed pitch, but sadly, it would appear that Chapman and the changeup are on a bit of a break. Not that it isn’t understandable. And not that Chapman needs a changeup to be a good reliever. He really, really doesn’t. I can’t emphasize this enough. Chapman in whatever form is amazing. It’s just that the most hilarious pitch in baseball is taking a nap.

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As a starting pitcher, you get to the All Star Game by dominating with a full array of pitches. You’re built to go deep into games and see lineups multiple times. You scout the opposing hitters and it’s all a lot of work. Then you get to the All Star Game, you break from your routine, you have to come in for a short stint, and you can air it out.

It’s a situation ripe for fastballs.

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Because of  interleague play, many of this season’s All-Stars have already seen who’s on the other side. But there’s a unique opportunity to see the best of the other league on one field in Minnesota. So I asked some All-Stars if they were looking forward to a particular matchup today.

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We talk a fair bit about Joey Votto in these electronic pages. Some may say we do it too much, perhaps. But it’s for a reason. It’s not that he’s paying us to — he’s not paying me at least. He’s simply a somewhat-fascinating specimen as far as baseball players go. He’s smart, he’s a pretty good model of consistency, he never pops out.

He’s also been a small point of consternation between the statistically-inclined and fans that adhere to a more traditional understanding of the game. There’s been disagreements revolving around his penchant for walks, his attitude toward RBI, his preference to hit to all fields rather than try and pull everything for homeruns. But fans on both sides of the argument can agree that Joey Votto just hasn’t been very good this season.

Actually, allow me to check myself before I subsequently wreck myself. Joey Votto, at least on the whole, has actually been more than serviceable in 2014. As a hitter, he’s still been 28% better than league average according to wRC+. But the whole story doesn’t tell the most recent story, and the recent version of Joey Votto has been subpar by any standards. Read the rest of this entry »

Before a game against the Padres, I sat down with Reds outfielder Jay Bruce to talk about his frustrating season so far, divorcing process from results, the value of routine, and his hitting approach in general. The player was so eloquent that it seemed best to leave his words alone.

Eno Sarris: I read a great piece you did with Trent Rosecrans recently. I thought it was very heartfelt and honest. When you said that in the past you felt what it feels like to be lost, and that you don’t really feel that this year, and about divorcing results from process. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the lost feeling — how did you feel that was so different then?

Jay Bruce: My whole life, I had not really had a fall back on routine. I just kinda played baseball and was really good at it, but everyone here is really good at baseball. Up until I got to the major leagues in 2009, I had never struggled anywhere. I mean I hit .270 in the GCL…

And you still hit for power. [.230 ISO]

Yeah. There was never really any reason to question what I was doing or why I was doing it or why I wasn’t doing it. I just always played. Just played baseball and the results came to what I thought they should have been and what the standard I had set for myself based on performances in the past. 2009 was the first time I wasn’t performing to the level I had expected and I didn’t have something to fall back on. What now? What do I do now?

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