Brayan Pena having great year behind the dish

Early on, the story with Brayan Pena was the surprising offensive performance the Reds got from him during April.  His bat has cooled off a lot since then, and his overall hitting numbers are now more or less on par with his career numbers: 80 wRC+ in 2014, 73 wRC+ career, 80-81 wRC+ projected by ZiPS and Steamer over the rest of the season.  That's good for something like a 0.3-0.4 WAR catcher by the end of the season.

I noticed this today, however:

Pena (highlighted) is already at +9.5 context-specific runs saved by his framing skills!  If you remove context (specific count), he's only +3 overall.  But that's still very solid when we're just over a third of the season played.

Entering the season, Harry Pavlidis projected Pena at +4 runs from framing alone.  Therefore, he's probably already shot past that projection.  This is great to see, and is consistent with what some of the twitter-verse told me as the season began.

Pena's other fielding numbers have been good: 36% CS rate (26% league average), and +4 runs by Chris Dial's catching system against stolen bases, passed balls, and errors.  I don't like him that much as the team's backup first-baseman, but he's been everything you could ask in a backup catcher.  And, very clear, he has been a terrific guy in the clubhouse.

Quick bit of prognostication: if we split the difference between the context-specific and context-neutral framing numbers (+6 runs), give him +4 runs for his other fielding performances, that gives him +10 runs on the season.  If he can double that, he'd end up a +20 fielder, which is worth 2 WAR.  I don't know if he'll do that, but even 1-1.5 WAR by season's end would be a solid performance from a backup!

Pirates Series Preview

Today I previewed the Pirates series at Red Reporter.  They're kind of the anti-Reds: great offense, lousy starting pitching.  The net result is pretty much the same; both teams are a tick below .500.

The Pirates were forecasted by many to regress from their fairy-tale season last year, and they have.  They sit a game below 0.500, a consequence primarily of their struggling pitching staff. While their rotation was a strength last season, they have struggled this year to put together good outings.  Even more problematic, their top two starters, Francisco Liriano and Gerrit Cole, recently found themselves on the disabled list with a strained oblique and shoulder fatigue, respectively. 

The good news for the Pirates is that their offense has been dynamite.  Their 105 wRC+ is the second-best in the league, and the arrival of Gregory Polanco might mean they could get even better.  The Reds' pitching staff could well have their hands full trying to contain the Pirates' bats.

Replay Is Working, but Not For Reds

The implementation of expanded replay has come under a fair amount of fire this year.  We've all seen a scenario like this: after the obligatory dawdle while his video guy looks at the play, the manager challenges a ruling on the field, and we all watch a number of angles at home while the umpire at MLBAM makes his decision.  The replays seem to clearly show that the call was incorrect...but, after a minute or two of a wait, the call in the field is upheld.  The reason?  No clear and indisputable evidence that the call was wrong, despite it being pretty clear that it actually is.

This scenario has both hurt and helped the Reds this year, but either way it is maddening to watch.  Replay is supposed to help get calls right.  If it's upholding the wrong call, then what is the point of going through this?

On this point, I saw this tweet come across my twitter feed a few days ago:

That'st the 233rd play that's been overturned in barely more than two months. (http://t.co/Yo6oTnxPhJ) Yeah, I'd say replay is a good idea.
— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) June 12, 2014

I thought it was a really good point.  Replay isn't perfect.  But with every overturned call, we're seeing mistakes being fixed that otherwise would have been upheld.  Umpires still blow calls, and replay still fails to correct some of them.  But we've already seen hundreds of incorrect calls fixed this season.  Hundreds!

The link in that post is to Baseball Savant, which is happily tracking all of the replay challenges this year via pitchf/x data.  It's a great resource.  As of now, the number of overturned calls has risen to 246 calls, which is 47% of all challenges.  Here's how that number has evolved this year:

The blue line is a cumulative average for the entire season.  What we can see is that the rate of calls being overturned started at or around 40% in April, but then rose steadily through May and has flat-lined around the current 47%.

The 9-day moving average is a bit more revealing.  It seems as though the replay umpires began the season being pretty conservative for the first two weeks.  Then, they started to routinely overturn just over half of the calls from that point on...with a strange dip that occurred at the end of May/beginning of June (~23 May through 3 June).  I don't know what happened during that dip, but the rate of overturned calls dropped down to 30% for a brief period.  I'm going to speculate that the umpires are still making adjustments to their internal criteria for when to overturn calls.  Therefore, we might have seen a short-term adjustment to be more conservative, which was then quickly relaxed.

Replays and the Reds

So, if the MLB average is that just shy of half of all challenges are successful in getting a call overturned, why does it seem like the Reds almost always lose their challenges?

Probably, it's because the Reds have almost always lost their challenges.  The Reds are tied for the fewest challenges in all of baseball with 9 (the highest are the Cubs & Rays with 23 each).  They have won just 2 of their challenges (22%).  In contrast, the teams the Reds have played have made 14 challenges against the Reds, and have won 8 of them (57%).  Replay has not been kind to the Reds thus far.

Who is to blame?  The Reds' video guy?  Small sample sizes?  Bad luck?  I'd lean toward the latter explanations.  But...yeesh, let's hope their luck changes soon.

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.

Jesse Winker: a near-future answer in left field?

Reds' prospect Jesse Winker has been having a terrific season in high-A Bakersfield.  He was a 1st-round (49th overall) compensation pick in the 2012 draft when the Reds lost Ramon Hernandez, and so far has vastly outperformed the Reds 1st selection that draft, Nick Travieso**.  He was the Reds' consensus #4 prospect entering the season, and had really strong preseason Oliver projections (0.331 wOBA, *if* he played in MLB this season).  Well, he hasn't disappointed:

And that performance is despite missing a week or so with a concussion following a collision with a wall.  Apparently, it's not currently a factor.

Doug Gray had a nice piece yesterday comparing his raw performance to that of other recent uber-Reds prospects, namely Joey Votto, Jay Bruce, and Devin Mesoraco.  The short version?  Albeit with caveats, he's comparing extremely well.  Excellent walk rates, solid strikeout rates, and excellent power (as mesaured by ISO).

What are the caveats?  Three big ones:

• Competition level.  Jay Bruce did spend some time at high-A, but also spent time at more advanced levels.  However, Votto and Mesoraco were primarily at low-A in their age-20 seasons, meaning that Winkers numbers are even more impressive in comparison with him.
• Run environment.  Because the Reds' High-A affiliate is now in Bakersfield, Winker gets to play in the California league.  That league has the highest run environment among leagues above rookie ball (~5.3 runs/game when I looked at this between 2007-2009).  And furthermore, Bakersfield is a moderate hitters park for that league (runs park factor 1.03), and is especially favorable to the home run (1.15).  By comparison, the midwest league is quite pitcher friendly, even if Dayton is a bit of a hitter's park (park factor 1.07), meaning that the games played by Votto and Mesoraco are close to neutral.  When Bruce played in high-A, he was playing in Sarasota with the Florida State League, which is about as pitcher-friendly of a league as you can find.
• Sample size.  Doug is comparing Winker's 239 PA's against a full minor league season by Bruce, Votto, and Mesoraco.

Nevertheless, despite all of that, it's very encouraging to see Winker performing so well!  I think it's reasonable to expect a mid-season promotion to AA at this point.  If he hits well there, he could potentially be at least a long-shot for left field coming into spring training in 2015.  This possibility was discussed by Joel Luckhaupt in a recent Redleg Nation Radio.  Goodness knows that the Reds could use some help in left field!

** This was not to condemn Nick Travieso.  After a slow start to his career, Travieso is having a quality season at Dayton this year as a control-oriented starter.  His strikeout rate is still far from where I'd like it to be, but he could potentially still work out to be a back-end starter.  Doug Gray has said that he's seen Travieso throw in the mid-90's over the past year (albeit inconsistently), so there might still be stuff there to succeed.

Cameron: Johnny Cueto's Fastball Unhittable

Dave Cameron pointed out today that a big part of what has made Johnny Cueto so amazing this year is that his four-seam fastball has been nearly unhittable:

I mean, sheesh.

Cueto is known as a sinkerballer, and that's still very much what he is.  His ground-ball percentage still stands at 53%, and he still throws his sinker a healthy portion of the time (22.5%).  But Cueto has been seeing uncanny results with his four-seam fastball, which he is throwing a bit more often this season:

***Note also: Tony Cingrani also appears on this graph of low wOBA allowed.

That increase in his four-seamer frequency seems to part of why he's showing a 1 mph increase in his "fastball" velocity this season, although all of his pitches are seeing small velocity increases:

I tend to expect that outliers as substantial as Cueto is in that first graph are due for a regression.  That shouldn't be a surprise, because Cueto has been so unbelievable this year.  It's pretty rare for a pitcher to be almost twice as good as everyone else on something.

Nevertheless, the Dodgers announcers were talking a lot about Cueto and the deception in his delivery last night.  I think that Cueto's increased velocity, coupled with the deception of how well he hides the ball during his delivery, are a bit part of why he's been able to accomplish what he has this year.  As Cameron states, this is not just a BABIP-inspired oddity.  I can't explain it either, but I am enjoying the ride.

Reprints: How Hitting Statistics Explain Runs Scored

This week in the SABR101x course, we're covering hitting statistics.  The lesson was very similar to an article I wrote 6 years ago on this site comparing the ability of different offensive stats to predict runs scored (many others have written such articles; it's a classic approach to addressing the question of hitting stat quality).

In it, I argued that there wasn't much of a problem to using OPS if it improved communication because the gains from it to other, better stats (like wOBA) were so meager.  Fortunately, in the time since, FanGraphs has popularized wOBA so much that I feel pretty comfortable just reporting it and ignoring OPS altogether.  And in many cases, I've even moved on to using wRC+ to get the advantages of park controls and run environment-neutrality.  OPS just isn't necessary anymore.

In any case, I thought it would be fun to reproduce that article here.  Here's the most relevant graph.  The rest appears below the jump.