Brewers Series Preview

My classes are over and the Brewers are coming to town!  It's the battle for last in the NL Central!

In the race for badness, the Reds are definitely looking like the team that is best at being the worst.  The Reds' offense has been abysmal to the Brewers only just kinda ok performance.  The Reds starters have posted a better ERA thus far, but they've matched the Brewers in badness according to peripherals.  And their bullpen has the clear lead in suckitude by both runs allowed and DIPS-based estimators.

The two teams' rest-of-season projections are both very close, with FanGraphs projecting only slightly fewer wins over the rest of the year.  That, plus the slightly better Brewers record, has the Reds at a very solidly bad 0.0% playoff odds, while the Brewers have a still-almost hopeful 0.2%.

So, yes, Reds all the way at being bad!

Position Players

Zack Cozart is making himself into quite a nice trade chip.  Yes, his BABIP is inflating his numbers, and he never will enjoy taking a walk, but he's showing good power and no apparent ill-effects from his surgically-reconstructed knee.  His fielding has looked solid on TV, and his too-early-to-be-worth-much UZR is in the positives, as is his base running metric.  He's been a legitimate catalyst at the top of the Reds lineup thus far, and over the past two years he has hit .283/.321/.480 in almost 300 PA's (not including yesterday's home run!).  If he's still a plus defender, and it looks like he is, that's quite a nice player.  A lot of contenders would be thrilled to have something approximating him at shortstop, and I hope they'll pay accordingly.

This is still a pretty nice offense.  Scooter Gennett is out with an oblique injury, and Aaron Hill has been a black hole thus far at third.  Nevertheless, everyone else has looked pretty good at the plate.  Chris Carter was getting a lot of attention from the statcast guys at the start of April, and he's been thumping the ball thus far just like so many thought he would.  I don't know if he'll keep this up, but the Brewers have to be thrilled at the prospect that he might have figured out how to hit at the major league level.  Ryan Braun is hitting like old times, and Jonathan Lucroy has been doing his thing.

Probable Starters

Chase Anderson was one of the key acquisitions of the Jean Segura trade this past offseason, and he was expected to step into the rotation as a steady #3-#4 starter.  He's not quite been that thus far, though he's been a heck of a lot better than the giant, steaming pile of suck that has been Alfredo Simon.

Tim Adleman had a magical day in his last start.  Let's just assume that he'll continue to strike out 27% of the opposition while avoiding walks.

I've been pretty happy with Brandon Finnegan thus far.  But I'm surprised, having just been watching his starts and not focusing on numbers so much, that his strikeouts are so low...and his walks so high.  His change-up has looked good to me.

John Lamb was my offseason mancrush.  But his velocity was not where it was last season during his debut start, and I thought his curveball looked like it had far less bite.  Maybe he'll be better next time.

Bullpens

Not much to say here!

So far, anyway, this has been a solid pen for the Brew Crew.  Tyler Thornburg has been striking everybody out, and Jeremy Jeffress gets nothing but ground balls, so that's a good start.  The rest haven't been quite so impressive, but it's all small sample size land.  Chris Capuano is the only lefty in the pen, so the Reds lefties don't have a lot to fear in late innings.

So, we have two teams in a transition period.  One is run by David Stern, an up-and-coming analytics-oriented GM who heralds from last year's great triumph of sabermetrics.  And the Reds are run by Walt and Dick.  It'll be interesting to see how all of that goes for the two teams in the coming years.


By way of acknowledgements, this post is brought to you by Rogue Sriracha Hot Stout Beer.  It is better with food than by itself, and I mostly drank it alone.

Optimism, Carlos Gomez, and Projections

I surprised myself with a surprisingly upbeat preview of the Brewers vs. Reds series today:

Going into their game against the Mets last night (as I wrote this), the Brewers had a 7.5-game lead on the Reds.  Now, one can't really hope for a sweep.  But can you imagine?  That'd suddenly put the Reds 4.5 games back.  With the Cardinals still hovering around 0.500, the Reds have an opportunity here.  I like the Reds pitching match-ups in all three games.  If the offense can build on what it did the last two games of the Dodger series, this could be an exciting weekend for the Reds.  Here's to optimism! Go Reds!

Somewhere recently, I saw someone write (I think for another team) that it's more fun to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.  I'm trying to adopt that view. :)

Carlos Gomez: A lesson on the importance of
patience, scouts, and tools.
Photo Credit: Keith Allison

I also wrote a bit about Carlos Gomez.  He fits into the mold of a former top prospect who had been given up on by nearly everyone, only to discover himself.  Others include Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, although to his credit, Gomez was never DFA'd.

Some of Lucroy's best competition in the MVP race is his center fielder, Carlos Gomez.  I think Gomez is fascinating.  I find it almost impossible to believe that he's only in his age-28 season, because it seems like he's been around forever.  He was the key acquisition in the Twins' deal that sent Johan Santana to the Mets before the 2008 season.  Despite playing in the majors as a 22-year old, he was largely considered a flop in the aftermath of that trade.  He earned a strong reputation as a great defensive center fielder, but he didn't hit a lick.  The Brewers acquired him in exchange for J.J. Hardy, a deal that many (myself probably included) panned.  Hardy was often-injured, but he was a quality offensive shortstop coming off a bad season, while Carlos seemed like the definitive no-hit defensive center fielder.  Then, something happened in the second half of 2012: Gomez started to hit for power.  From July through September, Gomez slugged 15 home runs (previous season high was 8).  He continued to show that power through last all of last season, and FanGraphs estimated his season value at 7.6 fWAR (though that might be a bit inflated by a +24 run fielding rating...though b-ref gave him +38 runs in the field and 8.9 WAR, so....).  He's one of the best players in baseball.

This is the kind of thing that has taken me forever to wrap my head around.  I am a projection guy, and rely on them to guide my evaluations of players to avoid getting overly excited about new changes in performance.    In fact, MGL just wrote a great piece on the importance of this approach, which was then summarized by Dave Cameron.  But there are guys for whom I am bound to miss with this approach, and Carlos Gomez (and Bautista and Encarnacion) are cases in point.  Therefore, while I use projections, I also try to keep an eye out for toolsy guys who seem to finally be figuring it out.  In my view, the lesson is to trust your projection tools, but to still be cautiously conservative in their ability to forecast the future.  I'll always have a blind spot for this kind of player, but hopefully I'm not as blind as I once was.

Brandon Phillips might have been my first lesson in that.  Here's what I wrote when the Reds acquired him:

Previously a highly-touted prospect out of the Montreal farm system, this guy is apparently going to sit on our bench this year. He is out of options, and the Reds seem to have acquired him from the Indians because they didn't want to lose him via waivers and he's not good enough to be on their team. Phillips had a very good half-year as a 21-year old in the then-Expos' AA franchise, hitting 0.327/0.380/0.506/0.886 in 245 at bats in '02. But that's the last time he had a really outstanding, prospect-like season. He was probably rushed a bit to the majors in '03, but was thoroughly ineffective there and hasn't done a whole lot since. His '04 campaign with the Indians' AAA affiliate was decent (0.353 OBP), but he regressed a bit in '05. Krivsky mentioned in his rain delay interview with Marty Brennaman today that Phillips hit 15 homers last year in AAA, which is good. But his slugging percentage was a fairly poor 0.409, particularly given those HR totals. Overall...I wouldn't expect much from this guy's bat this season, and perhaps not ever.

Phillips might be overrated by some of the Cincinnati media, but there's no question that I missed the mark badly on this one.  Phillips has posted five seasons as an above-average hitter during his time with the Reds, has played legitimate gold-glove defense, and has topped 3 WAR five times (and posted 2.9 fWAR a sixth time).  He's been an excellent player for the Reds since almost the first day he donned the Reds' uniform.  The scouts were right.