Matt Kemp has worked 4 walks this season and fanned 61 times. That's how a guy who pounds 15 home runs in 60 games still produces an OPS under .700.
The Cubs have won by far the most games in the Majors this year, but if you were to name an NL All-Star team right now they wouldn't have a single starter. In fact, the only player you could make a case for would be Dexter Fowler in center field.
The 40-man roster of the Atlanta Braves has hit 25 home runs this season. A washed up outfielder named Mark Trumbo has hit 20.
The world is upside down: Seattle is second in the Majors with 92 homers. The Cardinals are second in NL with 82.
The boom and bust Orioles have hit 3 triples. Twenty-four individual players have 3 or more, including speedsters Jay Bruce and Jonathan Lucroy with 5 each.
Red Sox base runners have been thrown out five times while stealing 43 bases. Astros right fielder George Springer has been thrown out six times while stealing four bases.
Clayton Kershaw has allowed six bases on balls while whiffing 122 batters. Mike Pelfrey, Yordano Ventura and Clay Bucholz have combined for three fewer strikeouts while walking 91.
Kershaw, Jake Arrieta, Noah Syndegaard and Johnny Cueto have allowed 16 HR combined, the same number as Max Scherzer.
Who's this year's best hitting rookie? You've been hearing about Trevor
Story's home run binge, Aledmys Diaz's league-leading batting average
and Nomar Mazzara's shiny future. But the rookie most tearing the cover
off the ball is 33-year-old Korean Dae Ho Lee. The giant Mariners' first
baseman is hitting .301/.339/.592 with 10 homers in 41 games.
You may have heard that Cincinnati Reds' relievers should be arrested for arson. They have closed out eight saves in 20 chances as a team.
Jeanmar Gomez & Mark Melnacon each have each also had 20 save chances. Each has converted 19 of them. Indeed, 19 individual pitchers have more saves than entire Reds bullpen.
On top of that, the Reds have the Majors' worst starter -- Alfredo Simon. His record: 2-6, 9.11. In 52 innings he's allowed 76 hits, 27 BB, and 14 HR. The league is hitting .338 against him. He's 2.2 losses worse than a Minor Leaguer the Reds could pick up at a quarter of the price.
What's up with the Cincinnati Reds?
During the interregnum between seasons, Billy Beane quixotically swapped future for present and present for future simultaneously, arousing furrowed brows among the cognoscenti. When the smoke cleared, though, it became more apparent what he was doing -- moving around the puzzle pieces for the best fit -- present and future.
In the Queen City, it's a bit murkier. Walt Jocketty's moves leave the Reds neither fish nor fowl, neither erecting nor bulldozing, neither contender nor rebuilder. A 76-86 contingent last season, the Rouge spent the off-season adding all of Burke Badenhop -- a middle reliever worth four WAR over his seven-year career. That will hardly serve as bulwark against the off-loading of starters Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon.
When those deals landed during the Winter meetings, it appeared Jocketty had either begun emptying the cupboards for a retrenching or cleared payroll space to acquire some badly-absent lumber. But then the flurry ended without a single flake more. What to make of a team teetering on mediocrity that jettisons 40% of its rotation -- about the only thing that worked last season -- and leaves it at that?
The answer is that four-fifths of the staff turns free agent after 2015 without any prospect of the cash-strapped club signing all of them. Jocketty is locked in on Johnny Cueto, whose 55-24, 2.48 and 17 WAR in his last 102 starts (over four seasons) argue that he's the runner-up for best pitcher in the NL. And Jocketty's keeping Mike Leake, a reliable #3, along with already-signed Homer Bailey and young flame-thrower Tony Cingrani. So he flipped injury-bitten Mat Latos and Simon, a flash-in-the-pan candidate, for a quartet of promising minor leaguers.
Fair enough, but what of the campaign ahead? The Redlegs are counting on a renaissance from their phalanx of injured stars -- Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips and Jay Bruce, plus sophomore-year improvement from Billy Hamilton and his .292 OBP. The trio of Votto, Phillips and Bruce contributed a combined win against replacement last year, less than what any one of them could be expected to deliver in 2015. In addition, either Ryan Ludwick will improve over his 112 games of wretchedness or a random replacement -- say, an armadillo -- will staff left field and add a win to Cincinnati's record.
Manager Bryan Price must also count on cornerman Todd Frazier and backstop Devin Mesoraco maintaining most of the 7.5 WAR they added in 2014 over their previous best. It wouldn't hurt either if glove-first shortstop Zack Cozart could stop getting worse with the stick. His .568 OPS last year was the exclamation point on a year-long sentence of Reds' hitting woes.
Stranger things than all the above have happened, but the betting line puts the team in the NL Central's fat middle, dueling Milwaukee and Pittsburgh for last place. Maybe then they re-sign Cueto and Leake and re-climb the hill in the future.
After the departure of Biggio and Bagwell, and repeated attempts to climb halfway up the mountain by swapping prospects for temporary fixes, the Houston Astros finally collapsed into a vortex of eternal mediocrity. When a new owner arrived in Houston in 2011, he cleaned out the front office and found a GM who was capable of flipping veteran assets for future value.
What followed has been three years of abject baseball poverty followed by a 2014 in which the rising stars picked off the opposition 70 times. Having this off-season inked Grade A relievers Luke Gregerson and Pat Neshek to free agent deals that address what ails the Astros most, the team is now poised to exit the vortex completely and make a run at respectability, with contention not far down the road.
So if the Astros are no longer the Astros, and the Pirates sport a winning-season streak, and the Cubs are emerging from hibernation, and their South Side counterparts are signing everyone who will, who is this year's Astros?
Which team is gutting the lineup in a reverse-engineered effort to rise later by crashing today?
It can't be the Padres; you need veteran talent before you can trade them for prospects. The Rockies don't fit the bill; they've slept through all the trade talk. And as semantically satisfying as it would be for Arizona to claim the mantle of turning to ashes for a phoenix-like rise later, the Dbacks are not so inclined.
This year's Astros won 90 games two years ago and maintain the core of that squad, yet they're lowering the lifeboats this off-season. It's the Cincinnati Reds, who cashed in two of their starters -- Alfredo Simon and Mat Latos -- in deals that brought prospects but cost five wins against replacement. Both pitchers will begin getting expensive this year and reach free agency in 2016.
When a 76-win team sheds five wins it either has no plan or it's aiming to bunny-hop to contention in future years. If another shoe drops; like a trade of Brandon Phillips, Joey Votto or Johnny Cueto; that will be a sure sign. If shoes stay on feet, then the current moves will be head-scratchers. Simon and Latos are too much to sacrifice if this team wants to compete in 2015 and they didn't bring enough back to punt the year and expect an immediate return to contention.
The Reds aren't a bad team -- probably somewhere between their last two records, not good enough to compete for a title but not bad enough to tear it down. So with the Cubs ascendant and St. Louis & Pittsburgh still at fighting weight, Cincinnati management may have concluded that the timing, not to mention finances, justifies an all-out strategy rather than all-in. What's curious about it is how far the Reds need to fall to really retrench. Catcher Devin Mesoraco, Votto, Phillips and third baseman Todd Frazier comprise four-fifths of an All-Star infield. Cueto, Mike Leake, Homer Bailey and Tony Cingrani still anchor a middling rotation and the Cuban Missile, Aroldis Chapman, is a human highlight reel out of the pen.
Then there's Billy Hamilton. He's a threat to score every time he gets to first. He starts doing that more often and YouTube could blow up.
In other words, the Reds would have been an odd choice for 2015's Astros before the winter trading commenced. But if they're not the 2015 Astros now they could join the 2011 Astros in the vortex of eternal mediocrity.
