Time for the update of the C-ing Red… something something, whatever I called that hotness index originally. Again, all caveats apply, but it’s actually holding my interest, so I figured I’d go ahead and share. Pretty much every is just cold right now. Votto and Heisey are hitting well, comparatively; Hanigan, Phillips, and Rolen are maintaining. Everyone else, is sucking a bit, hence the excessive amount of blue on the right side of the blog.

Votto though, is something else. A minor amount of comment has been made about Joey Votto’s slight lack of HRs, which was of course, more than made up for by his OBP and doubles power, and secondly, somewhat remedied by Sunday’s stellar performance. But Joey Votto’s name has come up in bright red nearly every-time I look at who’s hot right now.

Take a look at this graph of Joey Votto’s OPS over the course of this season.

Outside of the very small sample sizes at the beginning, and maybe like, one down week in mid-April. Mr. Votto has been on the up and up for the whole last three weeks, which is pretty awesome. Of course, this last jump is based on one phenomenal game, so even if Joey OPS’s 1.000 for the next month, that’s still technically a drop, but that just shows you how good Joey’s been thus far.

Also note that even though the offense has been pretty cold, we’ve won 3 out of the 5 games that the index covers, so it just goes to show, that a couple hot hitters, solid pitching, and a little luck can go a long way.

As far as turning things around tonight, Tim Hudson has looked vulnerable this year, but that’s only in 3 starts. He still boasts a pretty respectable ground ball rate, and for some reason, no current Red has been particularly good against him. Somewhat oddly, this will be the third time that Cueto faces off against Hudson – I noticed that with 4 PA against Hudson, Cueto has the sixth most PA against Hudson among all active Reds. Weird.