Which Nice Teams Are Starting Out Naughty?

Welcome to Atlanta, where your 8-25 Braves stand as the 2016 poster boys for mortgaging the present. It's hard to believe now, but the Cincinnati Reds have to wish they were the Braves.

The Reds tried to play both ends against the middle two off-seasons ago and ended up getting toasted both ways. After a 76-86 campaign in '14, they unloaded their second and third best starters but left the rest of the team intact, en route to a 98-loss season.

Having flipped ace Johnny Cueto for some future chips at last year's trading deadline, GM Walt Jocketty sent Todd Frazier to Chicago for more prospect goodies this off-season. And that was it.

Hanging on to middling veterans like Brandon Phillips, Jay Bruce (getting tagged out, left) and Zack Cozart, he left Joey Votto and the Seven Dwarfs to compete this year against the likes of Pittsburgh, St. Louis and the Cubs. By failing to convert veterans into promising youth, the Reds lack the prospect-laden farm system that hints at a brighter future.

At least the residents of Marietta, Georgia have a future to look forward to.

Others Worthy of Relegation
In short, neither Atlanta nor Cincinnati is surprising anyone with their wretchedness so far this season. Nor are the Twins, who blinded themselves into a false sense of hope with a moment of incandescence last season, nor the Padres, a basket case of a different weave, nor the A's, whose management seems to have run out of ideas about how to convert trash into energy. The Brewers are sowing the bad karma that building around Ryan Braun reaps, not to mention a pitching staff of the following luminaries: Taylor Jungeman, Jimmy Nelson, Willy Peralta, Chase Anderson and Zach Davies.

Then there's the Angels, despite a gargantuan payroll and two inner-ring Hall of Famers, who can't buy a run and whose best starter, now that Garret Richards got laid up is...um...the smoldering ruins of Jered Weaver? Dude hasn't fanned a Major Leaguer batter since 2014.*

It's possible we'll see some dead cat bounce out of Minnesota this year, but that's about the best this pile of owl upchuck can hope for. The real question for these franchises is whether they are on the way up or the way down, or whether they even have a way.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
All that leaves us with one head-scratcher, the Houston Astros. If ever a team was tailor-made for a season in which runs are being scored off big flies, it's this ultimate three true outcome team. Houston finished second in homers and fifth in walks last season, and first in whiffs, with seven batters accumulating 100+ Ks, including Colby Rasmus and Chris Carter, who fanned more than 300 times between them. (They also led the league in steals. Go figure.)

They're doing it again this year -- first in strikeouts, first in walks and fourth in going yard. The problem for the Astros is that the guys throwing the most innings are their worst pitchers. Starters 1-4, including last year's Cy Young, have been scorched fora combined 4.87 ERA. Starters #5 and #6 rock a combined 2.48 ERA and the bullpen has neither added nor subtracted.

The all-or-nothing offense combined with a pitching rotation regressing well beyond the mean have spelled doom for Houston, but there is good news in both the immediate past and on the horizon. They've won seven of their last 11 in large part because scads of ill fortune foisted upon them in April is settling out in May. The Astros have played sub-.400 ball so far but Baseball Prospectus projects them to play .543 the rest of the way. Projection systems are for movie theaters, but at least this suggests that the underlying conditions are there for a real recovery.

The early bottom feeders really do appear to be the sport's worst, with one exception. But baseball is a funny game and five months is an awfully long time.

*mild hyperbole but his average pitch speed is 82.7, or roughly how fast I can spit.

A Red Letter Day for Royals

Theirs is a most unusual, perhaps even unique formula for winning: no power, no starting pitching; all relief pitching and defense. The Royals are like a man with two broken legs who walks very fast on his hands. It's not that it can't be done; it's just not the way most do it, primarily because it's really hard.

Conventional playoff wisdom demands at least one ace, if not two, which is two more than Kansas City had. So, with an eye towards October, which GM Dayton Moore's club is now seven games closer to than their division rivals, they boldly swung a deal for Johnny Cueto. It feels like a quintessential win-win, even if it doesn't work out well for anyone.

Even with a third of a season of Cueto, the Royals still appear light on the mound in the first six frames of every game. Nabbing Cueto, who has hurled 1,000 innings of 2.72 ERA over the last five years, increases the already favorable odds (at least relatively speaking) of re-capturing the AL crown.

KC was a popular choice for the AL Central basement this year. Banking on reprised performances from a relief corps is a fools errand, and although defense tends to be less fickle than hitting, even a small dip in the field would have doomed the punchless Royals. Somehow, though, they've bottled lightning and charged to the top of the standings.

If you thought Kansas City was talent-challenged before this season, wait until Alex Gordon leaves after it's over. Between that and the unpredictability of their hitting, the Royals could return to perpetual doormat status starting in 2016. So it makes sense that Moore wanted to strike while the iron was hot.

It seems like they gave up a lot of future value for Cueto. No one ever knows with prospects, but 22-year-old Brandon Finnegan was a first-round pick who is pitching like one, now with the big club. John Lamb, a once-and-future Minor League star following TJ surgery, and semi-prospect Cody Reed, round out the deal. It seems like a nice haul for Cincinnati in exchange for 12 starts from a pitcher who can choose his hometown after the last wisps of the World Series trail off into the ether.

So the Royals make a run for it while they can and the Reds stockpile arms at essentially no cost. It's a good deal for both teams. Now we'll have to see whether the gods smile upon either or both ends.

The Price Is Wrong. So %@#*!& Wrong

 “I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.”

― Mel Brooks

 “Profanity is the effort of a feeble brain to express itself forcibly.”
― Spencer W. Kimball

Let's dispense with the irrelevant about Cincinnati manager Bryan Price's juvenile rant earlier this week: he cursed a lot. A lot, a lot. Seventy-seven times in five minutes, which is about as often as a lot of intelligent people use the word "like."

The first curse alerted his listeners that he was peeved. The second indicated he was annoyed. The third, irritated. The tenth, that he had lost control. And the thirtieth was incontrovertible proof that he was acting like a jerk. And he still had 44 to really drive home the point. He might say that he fucking drove it home.

Swear words are just words, symbols designed to communicate, as noted in this brilliant March 2014 essay by a sagacious and boyishly handsome philosopher. There is nothing particularly noteworthy about cursing, in and of itself. Employing the same adjective or adverb 77 times in 300 seconds on the other hand is not profane so much as it's inarticulate. It reduces the value of the rant's content.

Fortunately for Bryan Price, that's not possible. Because what's really objectionable about the tirade was its utter stupidity. Here is the crux of it in one sentence:

"Your job is not to sniff out every fucking thing about the Reds and fucking put it out there for every other fucking guy to hear. It’s not your job."

The problem with this statement is that it was made to a Cincinnati Reds beat reporter, whose job is to sniff out everything about the Reds and put it out there for every other guy to hear. That's his job.

Bryan Price was upset because a reporter had reported that Devin Mesoroco wasn't on a team flight due to injury and would not be available for the next game. The reporter was doing his job. Price may be confusing that reporter with the team's first base coach, or PR guy or assistant trainer. 

What makes this so perplexing is that Price is no MLB novice. A pitching coach with a long record of success across three organizations, Price is known around the league as articulate and thoughtful. He should have a firm grasp of the relationship between the Reds' manager and the Reds' beat reporters. He should have accepted it and learned how to make it work. That's part of the job of manager.

I hope this is merely a blip on the radar screen, indicative of a bad day and nothing more. Price's subsequent non-apology does not augur well, but perhaps he wrote that while still stewing in the moment, even hours later.

Reds in Black and White

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.

If the Astros Aren't 2015's Astros, Who Are?

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.