Horst promoted to Reds

Lefty reliever Jeremy Horst was promoted to the Reds today, the latest in a musical chair sequence of pitchers to arrive on this long road trip. Horst was converted back to relief last year after a one-year stay as a starter. He has posted good to solid k-rates, solid walk rates, and roughly average ground ball rates.

Perhaps the most important thing is that he's a lefty. As the lone left-hander in the pen, Bill Bray has gotten a ton of use lately, and might not be available tonight. And even if he is, this gives the Reds more options in the middle innings. We'll see how long he's here!

Changes I'd like to see in baseball

Wishlist for the next CBA, in bullet form:

• No more home plate collisions.
• Bats should be equipped with something like the batglove to prevent spears from flying around the field (or stands).  No more Tyler Colvin incidents.  Next time, somebody is going to die.
• Add a second wild card team and the wild card series, but structure it so that the winning wild card team will have a disrupted pitching rotation for the division series.  The easiest way is to do a 1-game wild card series.
• (this isn't actually a change, but...) Do not implement a hard slotting system for the draft.  Its main effect will be to send players to other sports.
• Allow for the trading of draft picks, though no more than two drafts in advance.

Home Plate Collisions

Buster Posey broke his leg last night in a collision with Scott Cousins. The play was deemed "clean," but it nevertheless means that Posey will likely miss the rest of the season.

Last year, Carlos Santana injured his knee on a similar play. He missed the rest of his rookie season.

I just don't get why this has to continue: there is no obvious reason to me why collisions at home plate should continue be permitted. If they did not exist, would they be invented? No, I don't think they would. And it isn't like they remove all excitement from the game. Rather than a collision, wouldn't you instead want to see something like this?

Players are getting hurt. Beyond this being a workplace issue for them, their injuries means that we don't get to see exciting players play. Let's fix this.

It's an easy solution too.  The play is already illegal.  Catchers shouldn't block the plate without the ball, and baserunners should never be permitted to crush the opposing team's catcher.

Follow-ups
After writing this, I discovered I was not the only one having these same thoughts:

• Rob Neyer talks about it, and he's right. 
• Tom Tango talks about it, and proposes and an even more extreme solution.  I don't think force-outs are necessary.  Let's just enforce the rules that are already on the books and keep baserunners from knocking over catchers.
• Also, Dave Cameron.  Nice quote from Kevin Millar.

Scorecard - 5/9/11 Reds over Astros

No, probably not starting up with the blog again. But I wanted to post this scorecard from the Reds/Astros game on May 9th. 'Cause there's no way you could get this info by opening up MLBAM Gameday, nosir.

BtB "Sabers" complete

Today we posted the results of the final category in the BtB Sabermetric Awards. This was the first time I've tried to organize anything quite on this level in the sabermetric community, but I'm extremely pleased with how it all went. Hopefully, we can do it again next year. Here are the award result posts:

1. Best Novel Research Article/Project
2. Best Applied Research Article/Project
3. Best Primer or Review Article
4. Best Commentary Article
5. Best Writing/Research Website
6. Best New Online Resource
7. Best Writer/Researcher

Onward to the next project! I still have this minor league thing I want to get finished, and after that it will probably be time to start working up a team projection for the Reds. I'm pleasantly optimistic right now about their chances to top 0.500 this season...

Current activities

I finally finished a post at Red Reporter that I've been working on for almost a month (and planning since September). I'm not sure the result is as fabulous as all of that would imply, but it's an investigation of the degree to which the Reds were hurt by playing time shortfalls in it starters compared to simply failing to perform when healthy. Punchline: aside from Volquez (who accounts for 35% of the overall ~7 WAR shortfall), mostly it was simply a failure to perform.

At BtB, I'm managing the Sabermetric Writing Awards. I thought of the basic idea for the awards while working on my baseball class (more on that in a sec). The BtB crew were very enthusiastic about it when I pitched it to them, and in the internal discussion, the idea expanded from ~3 categories to the 7 we are currently running. Nominations are going pretty well, though I think there is a bias toward stuff done over the past few months. Still, I've already seen a bunch of stuff that I had missed, and that's sort of the main point.

The baseball class, which I announced here, starts on Monday. I'm a bit anxious about it, but I think I'm about as well-prepared for it as I can be, and I'm excited to get started. I'm perhaps naively hoping that the students will follow my obsession in player valuation, but we'll see. First thing I'm going to do is have them pick the topics for the semester. It will probably be the case that this class will be the extent of what I can do baseball-wise for at least the first half of the semester. But one of my classes ends at spring break--just as spring training really gets underway--so that should help.

I also wanted to link to my post on the Hall of Fame ballot from December. It's gotten some decent play (Neyer link, for example), and apparently Sky did something similar at ESPN this week. The one guy I left off of my ballot, Dawson, is the guy who got in--but I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is all of the deserving individuals who should have gotten in before Dawson.

Reds Season Review

Image via Wikipedia

I completed a "sabermetric" (I still don't like that word, but I've become resigned that I have to use it to be understood) review of the 2009 Cincinnati Reds at Red Reporter. Here are the parts:

• Part 1 - Introduction & Overview
• Part 2 - Hitting
• Part 3 - Fielding & Total Win Value
• Part 4 - Pitching

Did some fun things here:

• The introduction piece has a nice historical angle to it that I really like.
  
• The position-by-position run above average plots in the position player pieces were a nice way of summarizing the overall team performance.
• The hitting info included full baserunning from baseball prospectus pull park corrections, so I think it's the best available right now for Reds players.
  
• The fielding info incorporated fan scouting data in a semi-crude, but still useful way. Again, I think it's the best available for Reds players.
  
• I also really like the introductory graph for the pitcher piece. People can complain about one metric vs. another, but when all three approaches show the same thing, I think it paints a pretty strong picture.

Well, that's enough patting myself on the back for one day. It's exam week and I have to figure out what I'm going to do if school gets snowed out tomorrow.