The Reds Performance in 2011

One of the best and worst parts of the month and a half leading up to the regular season is the endless stream of preseason outlooks and predictions.  I mean, everyone has to do it, but so many of them aren't worth reading and most of the time we will inevitably (1) forget they even existed once the season starts, or (2) realize how silly it is to try and predict the goings on of a baseball season.

However, one series that certainly IS worth reading is this 30-part Question of the Day bit that Rob Neyer is doing over at SB Nation.  Today he addresses the Reds, though it's funny because the actual question doesn't seem to have much to do with the majority of the post, but of course that doesn't really matter.*

*The question is about baseball fans in Ohio and he points out that both the Reds and Indians have had successful seasons recently but didn't seem to perform as well in attendance as one would have expected.

Neyer brings up many points that have been discussed over at Redleg Nation and have been thought by me at some time or another (and who knows, maybe I even wrote them down in previous posts... I don't really remember).  He basically covers the two key issues...

The Reds are highly unlikely to lead the league in scoring again. Among the 13 Reds who totaled at least 100 plate appearances, Orlando Cabrera was the only one who had a bad year at the plate. Everyone else was either adequate, good, or great. Cincinnati's catchers, mostly Ramon Hernandez and Ryan Hanigan ranked second in the league in RBI, third in OPS. Scott Rolen stayed reasonably healthy and added to his Hall of Fame resume. Joey Votto, you know about.


This should still be a good hitting team. But perhaps not a great one.

...

I haven't looked at the underlying projections, but I will guess the Reds project to 84 wins because their hitting is expected to regress and their pitching isn't expected to improve at all.


I'm not going to argue with PECOTA. I don't know which of these fellows will be a Cy Young candidate, either. And if the Reds can't figure out an answer, it might be a long season.

So to recap, (1) we can't count on the Reds offense performing as well as it did last year, and (2) the Reds have a deep rotation with a handful of middle of the rotation guys but no ace, yet.*

*I of course recommend reading the whole thing.  One commenter - I think he writes for the Red Reporter - does point out that PECOTA is by far the most pessimistic projection for the Reds in particular.

And that's basically it.  Listen, the Reds have a good team, and I think it's pretty cool that we're arguing to what degree the Reds will be above .500 instead of is this the year they finally have a winning record.  It's a nice discussion to have.

But the bottom line is, the Reds need an ace, and yes they have a very deep staff, but they are gambling that one will emerge internally.  And they were content to stand pat on offense with no significant upgrades at the two opportunity positions.

All the forecasts are really saying the same thing, with different levels of optimism.  My prediction?  I'm excited for the year, I love this Reds team, and it should be a great race in the Central.

January Update

As I'm guessing lots of people can tell you, keeping up a blog when you know there aren't many people reading it can be hard.  Especially a baseball blog in the middle of winter.  I find myself more often at Redleg Nation responding to one of Chad's posts, where I know people will actually read what I write.  But anyways, the point is that if this is ever something that will develop, I need to do it consistently, whether people are reading or not, because it's about the practice and the experience (thanks for the advice Rob!).

So, since I wanted to get something down yesterday but ran out of time, I decided to give the blog a quick make over instead.  As you can see there's a new background and color scheme.  I think it gives it a more open and airy feel, like you might actually be at a ballpark watching a game instead of staring at the inside of some random Reds fan's boring computer.  I did miss the red though so I added a border and a familiar friend at the top, though I'm not sure it lines up perfectly on all computers, and I don't know if I can move the title over a little to prevent it from overlapping (ah well).

Anyways, I would like to advertise for an upcoming post involving fan projections done on the fantastic website, fangraphs.  If you're a baseball fan and you've never been there, I highly recommend it.  The amount of information available is mind bottling.  And if you're a stat-minded fan, well, you may have to change your pants.  There they allow every fan to enter projections for each player.  They actually do it in a very interesting way and I'm obviously not really sure about all the assumptions they make, but it's very cool, and after you enter all your inputs, they will even calculate a WAR for each player (that's Wins Above Replacement - more details are available at fangraphs).

Point is, I've done a set of projections for the Reds, and I'd like to go over the results.  As you might imagine, it's hard to tell how trustworthy any of this is considering I'm guessing how baseball players will perform (an impossibly hard task), and I'm doing it for the team I love, so clearly I'm not unbiased.  But I tried to be as fair as possible.

So, until that is made available, please spend all of your time at the sites linked above.  Thanks.

2 Random Thoughts

• So I've already stated my new lease on (blog) life.  However, I also wanted to mention that I was severely off base in a post made earlier this year titled "About this blog".  I stated that there must not be a notable Reds blog, especially one with a "sabermetric focus", if the Reds' spot on Rob Neyer's Sweet Spot network wasn't yet filled.
  
  
  Well, as I should have known, of course there are Reds blogs, lots of them, and lots of good ones.  And that spot has since been filled by Redleg Nation, which is a fantastic blog that I now check every day.  And on top of that, they are actually very sabermetric friendly over there.  So, I'm not saying that anyone noticed, but I wanted to right that wrong.

• On the way home earlier this week I listened to ESPN's radio affiliate in Chicago interview the newest White Sox player, and former Red, Adam Dunn.  The guy is still a great interview and was a great player for the Reds and it's a shame the perception many in Cincinnati had of him.  I know it's been said plenty of times but his style, both on and off the field, was misunderstood and when he left the Reds definitely missed him.
  
  I was hoping to have some stats prepared to show just how valuable he was to those Reds teams, but I mostly just wanted to get this down (and it's not like you can't look the stats up yourself!).  Anyways, I will definitely be following him up here in Chicago and wish him the best.

About this blog

Maybe not surprisingly, the earliest Reds moment I can distinctly remember watching, and can still play back in my memory today, occurred on October 20th, 1990 in the foul territory just next to first base. Todd Benzinger, not even the Reds regular first basemen (maybe he came in for defensive purposes) caught a harmless pop foul to complete a 4 game sweep of the mighty Oakland A's. I still have the Wheaties box with that Reds team on it. A "Wire to Wire" tshirt still inhabits my tshirt drawer. And just as many other lifelong baseball fans can point to a moment when their love of the game first began, I was hooked.

I could make the claim that my first academic memory came when I competed in the district math bees during my elementary years. Top 5 finishes in 1st and 2nd grade set the stage. You know those blurbs you sometimes see in magazines where they ask some professional athlete when they knew they could be something special? Well for me it wasn't athletics, but rather mathematics, and that moment occurred when I took home the gold in 3rd grade. Of course the very next year I tumbled out of the top 20, which made me worry I'd peaked early.

As with most things, I was a bit late to the Moneyball party. But when I finally got around to reading the book, I was into it. Since then I've developed and even deeper interest in the game, and guys like Rob Neyer and Joe Posnanski (and many others) keep my interest piqued by writing (and talking, and talking about others' writing) about how the game is constantly evolving, and how the way we view it is ever changing.

So, I'll stop rambling on with lame backstory and say that I love baseball, probably more than ever before. And for someone who is also a numbers nerd, the "statistical revolution" of the last decade has been a lot of fun. Rob Neyer has his own blog on ESPN and this spring they have started a "blog network", with the ultimate goal to have an associated blog for every major league team. When I first heard about this endeavor I was excited since I had been unable to really find much of a Reds blog. Well as it turns out, I don't really think there is one, and certainly not one that has any sort of sabermetric focus (whatever that means exactly).

I'm not saying that my link will be on ESPN any time soon, but hey, why not take a negative (no Reds blog) and make it a positive (limited competition for beginner Reds bloggers). So that's what I've decided to do. You can see that I've taken two cracks at it already, and certainly there's a lot to learn. For instance, I went into that Brandon Phillips post ready to argue with anyone who thought Phillips should bat any higher than 5th in the lineup. After looking at some numbers though, I realized that the Reds really don't have any good top of the lineup guys. The post ended relatively soon after that.

The cool thing about blogging though, is that you can essentially do whatever you want (not to mention edit and proofread as little as you want). And what I want to do is this - take my thoughts and inquiries as a Reds fan (many of which are numbers driven) and put them in writing. And maybe, someday, those thoughts might catch the attention of a Rob Neyer, or someone else in the blogosphere. Hey, he's already read one of my posts! And actually, at this point, I think he's one of four people to read anything on here.

So to those who are actually taking in these words, enjoy!