Mike Leake and the Reds were $850,000 apart from each other. (photo by dbking/Flickr)

EDIT: Added Simon and Heisey. All numbers are available here.

So far, only one Red has avoided arbitration for sure – the team and Logan Ondrusek signed a two-year deal earlier this week. That means a good number of Reds players were filing for arbitration this week, and Jon Heyman tweeted some of the numbers out.

So far, Latos and the Reds filed pretty close together,  so that could be a 1 year deal pretty soon, if they’re not working on a multi-year contract. The spread for Bailey’s and Leake’s numbers are a little bigger. Choo’s got the biggest spread, and I thought it was interesting that Choo, whose agent is Scott Boras, basically submitted the same as the MLB Trade Rumors projection. MLBTR could be misjudging the arb-market for Choo, but it makes me wonder if Choo’s less likely to settle, because it seems to me like going to an arbitration hearing is a great way to get off on a bad foot with your new center fielder.

Here’s a summary, with some reference numbers.

There’s nothing like a sexy, attention-grabbing headline, right? Anyway, the news has been out for a little bit that the Reds are thinking about signing extensions with the arb-eligible starters Bailey and Latos, though there hasn’t been a lot of progress on that front. As I’ve said  before, Walt hates arbitration, so I’m confident that there will be deals done with this guy – but for one year, or more, who knows?

I was curious though, to look at the extensions that teams have signed with pre-free agency pitchers in the last few years, and came up with a few examples – specifically, I narrowed the list to starting pitchers with extensions starting in the first (Latos) or second (Bailey) season of arbitration eligibility.

Voila:

The sample size isn’t huge, but the times, they are a changing, so I didn’t want to go back much farther.

The salary numbers for the arb years when you’re starting with Year-4 are a little more consistent. Latos obviously isn’t a Clayton-Kershaw-already-got-a-Cy-Young-award type – but he does compare pretty well to Matt Cain , and I would say that Cain’s 3 year, 27 million dollar contract is probably out of our range. That contract was signed three years ago, and there have been a lot more reasonable extensions signed since then – but none of those guys have quite the impressively consistent numbers that Latos has.

Bailey is a little more out there. First, though WAR isn’t perfect, Homer clearly has been a level below a lot of the guys who have signed these extensions recently. Obviously Verlander, Lincecum and Hernandez are not relevant comparisons – and Johnson and Greinke are probably out too, since they signed right after having a ~5 WAR season. Bailey was better this year, but he’s not nearly there, no-hitter or not.  I think Jackson/Feldman/Morrow are closer cases than Ricky Nolasco, too, and only one of those guys signed a deal that went into free agency. Still, a little payroll predictability would be beneficial, if we can get Homer to sign for the next two years.

So… man, Johnny Cueto’s extension looks awesome now. Well done, there, Walt-O-Meal.

NOT THAT KIND OF BATTERY, GUYS.

Well, that’s probably not fair to Devin. In any case, here’s a battery combo chart (which I started doing last year), for the 2012 Reds. (The 2011 version, with an explanation is here).  This chart is very different from 2011′s, but at the same time, it’s remarkably similar. For one, we had only 6 pitchers start this season, a far cry from the 10 different starters we used in 2011. Along with that, Redmond only started one game, so having 5 starters combine for 161 starts this season is really remarkable – in 2011, we had six pitchers with at least half a season’s worth of starts, and Willis and LeCure had a few as well.

This shows us that whatever Dusty may have said back in 2009 (~), he definitely favors designated catchers, no matter the primary language of his backstops. Arroyo/Hanigan is a combination that’s been going on forever, but Cueto has been caught almost exclusively by Hernandez since getting to the big leagues. This year, all but one of his starts was caught by Hanigan, and that turned out really well for both Cueto and the Reds. Leake has expressed him preference for Mesoraco before – so it’s not surprising that Devin became his full-time catcher this year.

I think the Latos and Bailey situations are pretty interesting. I’m probably reading too much into this, but the fact that Meso caught Latos’ first three starts really caught my eye. It makes sense that Dusty would try to assign Mesoraco to Latos , both of them being new to the Reds, essentially. But Latos’ first three starts were not impressive. In his fourth start, Latos was caught by Ryan Hanigan, and his best outing thus far, and his very first Reds win – after that it was all Hanigan. Now, that, again, is probably not fair to Devin. Latos’s firth start was also not great, and Mat’s had some recurring early season woes. You hope that the switch to Hanigan was more just about a change of pace for Latos, as both him and Mesoraco figure to play big parts in Cincinnati Reds teams of the future.

On the other hand, it’s no slight to Devin that Hanigan is an excellent defensive catcher, and has a lot more experience calling games than Mesoraco does. Meso’s only 25, which gives him plenty of time to learn some veteran catching tricks. Plus, he’s got a good chance to develop into a pretty strong hitter. For now though, matching up Latos and Hanigan meant that Mesoraco needed to catch another pitcher almost full time – and that pitcher was Homer Bailey. Bailey was caught mostly by Hanigan in his MLB starts in 2o11, but he also matched up with Mesoraco a few times, and probably worked with him during his rehab time at AAA.

Homer had a pretty great season with Devin as his full time backstop. But it probably hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that it was Hanigan who caught Homer’s no-hitter – and by ERA, K and BB numbers, Bailey was better with Hanigan calling the shots. Of course, that was mostly in the last part of the season, after Mesoraco got suspended and demoted in favor of Dioner Navarro as backup – the end of the season has also been when Bailey has done some of his best pitching in the last two years – so much like with Latos, it could just be an unfortunate happenstance that puts Mesoraco’s handling in a bad light.

All this makes me wonder what the plan is for next year. The Reds definitely favored Navarro after Mesoraco’s suspension this year, but Navarro is gone now, which leaves us once again with the Hanigan/Mesoraco situation. Hanigan catching Cueto/Arroyo/Latos, with Mesoraco catching Bailey/Leake is fairly like scenario, but it’s a little hard on Bailey to say “With Hanigan, you threw a no-hitter, but Mesoraco will be catching for you for all of 2013, kthxbye!”  It may be time to shake up the catching situation so that no one has a designated catcher. (Or maybe just Arroyo). I also wonder a little bit about Hanigan – Hanigan played 112 games in 2012, the most he’s ever played in the majors. Along with that came one of his worst hitting performances. Now, he’s still valuable at that level, given his on-base and defensive talents, but if we can get him down to half-time, he may be able to hit a little better, as well.

Of course, maybe we’ll just trade away Homer Bailey, and it won’t be an issue anymore. (/sadface)

Or, more likely, I’m reading too much into things.

This is sort of like a dream situation for me. Not only did a Reds pitcher pitch a no-hitter, but it’s one of the boys who is closest to my heart. Homer Bailey first hit my radar in ’05, as a first round draft pick from the previous year, and one of baseball’s top pitching prospects. He was also my first baseball crush – I mean, you don’t run around joking about being the future ex-wife of someone without developing a special bond.

Plus, it’s a rare occasion where I can do an in-depth pitchFx hitter-by-hitter analysis of a game and maybe someone will actually care about it. (All pitch f/x data and graphs courtesy of Brooks Baseball). Disclaimer: I am super not an expert on either pitching or pitch f/x. Please correct me if you disagree with something.

In his post game interview, Bailey mentioned that the weather was cold, and he didn’t have his, necessarily, best stuff. You can really kind of see the temperature issue in this graph, which is probably my favorite representation of the game.

At the beginning of the game, you see that Bailey wasn’t 100% warmed up yet, and his fastball velocity was relatively low. 93.4 is Homer’s average four-seam fastball velocity this season. Over the course of the game, you can see him get into it, and then watch his adrenaline climb in the last few innings, until it seems as if he’s just hurling fastballs at the plate as fast as possible by the time he reaches the 9th.

The pitch f/x data is a little bit difficult because the algorithm just doesn’t know what Homer Bailey’s splitter looks like. In the yearly stats, brooks baseball has a manual input format that picks out the split-fingered fastballs, but I’m pretty bad at it. Of course, you also have the other various inaccuracies that pitch f/x always turns up with. Here’s the horizontal movement x speed chart for the game.

In this graph, I think the splitters fall out pretty nicely – those three ‘changeups’ that are around 83 mph, with negative horizontal movement. The manual input version suggests that Bailey doesn’t throw a change at all, so I’d guess the other three changeups are just fastballs of some sort. I suspect that some of the pitches listed as sliders are also cut-fastballs, as well.

As many noted, Bailey used a lot of fastballs, the pitchf/x count of 70 four-seam fastballs out of 114 pitches seems about right, but being able to locate the fastball is what got Homer through the night, he threw 50 of them for strikes. That helped Bailey drastically improve the swing-and-miss rate on his fastball – though it was much lower for his breaking-balls, compared to his season averages. But the whiffs were timely – out of only 17 swinging strikes/foul tips, 7 of them finished up a strikeout. Bailey also staid away from the batters religiously. (This fangraphs piece, really goes into the excellent work done by Hanigan and Bailey). As Moore notes, Bailey seemed to get the benefit of the doubt in the called strikes, and he probably has Hanigan’s excellent pitch framing skills to thank for tht.

After the cut, I’ll do each at-bat, separately. As you might imagine, this will probably involve a LOT of over-analysis, and reading things out of the data that just aren’t there. (I generally refer to Bailey making the decisions, although obviously, I think Hanigan was more in charge of pitch calling during the game)

» Continue reading “114 Pitches, 0 Hits: A Hitter By Hitter Pitch F/x Analysis of Homer Bailey’s No-Hitter”

(Photo by Keith Allison/Flickr)

Tonight was an amazing night! You’d have to have been in a coma tonight to not know that Homer Bailey no-hit the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Pittsburgh has always been good to homer, and tonight was the pinnacle of that.

Bailey was amazing just simply tonight, striking out 10, with only 1 walk, and one error – a controversially scored play by Scott Rolen. Homer Bailey looked good starting the game, but not particularly special. But he was really locating the fastball, and his sliders and curveballs were really moving. Bailey was not notably bailed out by spectacular defensive plays, either. All in all it was a performance well deserving of being the 15th Reds no hitter (And the first since Tom Browning’s 1988 perfecto).

Credit to Ryan Hanigan as well, for calling the game, and for catching Andrew McCutchen at third base. (McCutchen walked, and then stole second).

Of course, things were a little complicated by the fact that A.J. Burnett was throwing almost as well/ the Reds hitters were doing almost as badly as the Pirates’. A couple of hits, and a Joey Votto walk loaded the bases  in the first inning, but the Reds got only one run on a sac fly by Todd Frazier before Burnett got Jay Bruce to ground into a double play. The Pirates also doubled off Scott Rolen in the second, but other than that, the Reds had very little offense.

Tonight was definitely a ground-ball-y kind of night. A.J. Burnett has been great at getting groundballs in 2012. His 56.6% groundball percentage is good for 4th among qualified pitchers, and his 15 groundballs out of 24 balls in play was true to that. Homer Bailey was even better – though he had fewer groundball outs. Still 10 out of 15 balls in play for Bailey were groundballs. Homer just replaced the line-drive singles Burnett gave with strikeouts.

In closing: Yay!

Yay for Bronson! (Photo by DavidMeyersPhotos on Flickr)

There’s not much to talk about right now: the Reds had the day off, the division is well in hand, and our manager doesn’t go around telling people he . There is some mild concern in the Cueto arena. He’s had three increasingly distressing starts. It started with a reasonable, but somewhat hard luck start, where four runs scored, via two home runs – and we all sort of knew Cueto’s home run had to run out at some point. The last two have been more in the way of bad.

It doesn’t seem like an issue, but it’s nice to remember that we have other capable pitchers in the rotation. Leake hasn’t been so great of late, but he’s more than serviceable for a No. 5 .  All members of the rotation show up in this list – it seems unlikely, but it actually includes the top 7 pitching performances, since three starts are tied for number 5. Yes, I’ve used game score, as is my wont. I like it.

Number 5 (ish): Johnny Cueto, June 23; Homer Bailey, May 29; Mike Leake, August 15

• This is Cueto’s only appearance on the list, somewhat surprisingly – not too much, because Cueto’s byword is sustained excellence, not individual performances here and there. Cueto pitched this perfect game against the Twins. The three hits he allowed included a double by Joe Mauer, but no other extra base hits, and he yielded only one run, with 9 strikeouts. He did hit a dude, as well, but I think that doesn’t count towards gamescore.
• Bailey appears one more time on the list, but this game was against the Pirates, who we know Homer loves to face. He pitched a complete game, allowing only 1 run on 4 hits – with 1 BB and 5 K. Bailey’s complete game was in contrast to the Pirates, who used 6 pitchers after starter Charlie Morton left after the fourth
• This is also Leake’s only game on the list, just one month ago versus the Mets. Mikey outpitched R.A. Dickey in this one – throwing a complete game, 1 R, 0 BB, 4K. None of the hits he allowed were for extra bases, and went to only two of the Mets hitters – he shut down the other 3/4 of the line up entirely.

Number 4: Homer Bailey, September 1.

This is sort of a horrible one, because, as you might remember (it was only two weeks ago), the Reds actually lost this game – and not even in extra innings. Homer Bailey pitched about as well as you could want – though to the not-well-hitting Houston Astros. He went 8 innings, allowed 1 run on 3 hits, a walk, and 9 strikeouts. Of course, one of those hits was a home run – which figures for the run scored. Homer’s mistake was throwing 107 whole pitches in that 8 innings, which meant that Sean Marshall took over the mound in the bottom of the 9th, with the game tied 1-1. Marshall allowed a double, intentionally walked the next guy, and hit the guy after that. Thus, when Brandon Phillips made on error on Jose Altuve’s groundball, the Astros walked off, despite all Bailey’s fine work. Boo.

Numbers 2 and 3: Mat Latos and Mat Latos, June 25 and June 30

Mat Latos really outdid himself against the Brewers on June 25 – pitching a complete game, with a very impressive 13 strikeouts, especially since that’s a team that can kind of hit. It’s tough to come back and try to match that performance, but Mat did it against the Giants. Exactly. Obviously the game wasn’t exactly the same, but he matched his gamescore of 86 exactly with another complete game – one run allowed, no walks and 7 strikeouts. Latos has struggled with home runs at Great American, but you can still tell that he’s a great pitcher in the making.

Number 1: Bronson Arroyo, July 6

It’s appropriate that number one on this list belongs to the elder statesman of the Reds rotation – who has both struggled and excelled during his time with the Reds, but whose innings numbers will be hard to match. It the only shutout pitched by a Reds pitcher in 2012. Arroyo did so in PetCo against the Padres, which perhaps hints at the secret of Bronson’s success, but it’s undoubtedly a great pitching performance anyway: 9 innings, 0 runs, 3 hits, 1 BB, 8 Ks. That’s the second best number of Ks in a game for Bronson this year, so you know it was a pretty great day for him all-around.

So now that we’re all thinking happy thoughts, let’s not lay awake in our beds, obsessing about the playoff rotation. Go to sleep friends, it will be alright. There’s baseball tomorrow.

This is not an original idea or anything, I know I’ve seen them around, in various permutations and combinations, and maybe in almost exactly this form, too. The data is all from ESPN Home Run Tracker. The length of the line is the related to the speed off the bat, and the elevation angle contributes the angle of the vector. I also differentiated HRT’s main classifications by color. “No doubters” are in red, “Plenties” are in blue, and “Just enoughs” are in green. (The colors didn’t exactly come out perfect). I believe the speed off the bat is just calculated from the distance and angle, but it’s there to give an idea of the pure amount of force.

The best comparison is Bailey (above) and Arroyo. Bailey’s let a lot of low, hard hit go over the wall in Great American, but Bronson’s home runs are coming on a lot of higher flies. You can see how hard hit Bronson’s no doubters are, too.

Then, of course, you have Johnny Cueto, who makes my life easy by not giving up home runs.

Mat Latos has also had a few high flies – but also has a bunch of low, just-enough home runs. You can see where he would have done much better in PetCo’s spacious confines.

Mike Leake’s had a little better overall luck with home runs than Latos, or Bailey, but he seems to have a smaller proportion of GABP-specials.

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of analysis on these – I just thought they were pretty. And maybe a little interesting.

The Homer Bailey who pitches in Great American looks like this but has an eeeevil goatee. (Photo by Keith Allison/Flickr)

It’s no surprise that most all of the Reds pitchers have big home-road splits. They play in one of the  most home run friendly parks in the game. But Homer Bailey, in 2012, has been like two different pitchers. The other Reds pitchers at least line up in the same order home and away: Cueto, Latos, Arroyo, Leake. Homer, on the other hand is the worst pitcher, by ERA, in Great American. Away, on the other hand, Homer starts to look more like Johnny Cueto.

There’s a little bit of peripherals noise between home and away – but the big difference, for Homer at least, are in the home run rate and BABIP. The home run rate is the really big one. Homer’s allowed 17 home runs in 13 games started (not including today’s game), and only four in 12 away start. Here’s the home and away splits for the batted ball numbers.

HR/FB is something of a luck-based statistic, but it’s odd. It’s obviously and logically park-based. The league average is about 8%, but obviously that’s not going to apply to Great American. Homer’s GABP HR/FB is the highest among our starters – but away, it’s even lower than Johnny Cueto’s away HR/FB.

But that’s not all, two of Homer’s 4 away home runs were in Yankee Stadium. But Home Run Tracker indicates that both Jayson Nix’s and Russell Martin’s May 19th homers were “just enoughs”; indeed, both would be home runs in only one park in the majors – Yankee Stadium. If we take out that game – Homer allowed only two home runs in 11 road starts. (Incidentally, those home runs were both by former Reds – Chris Denorfia and Jerry Hairston, Jr.) Impressive… or lucky. (If only home run tracker also tracked flyouts and doubles!)

But on the home front, Homer’s been really, really terrible. In Great American, he looks a little unlucky. Home run tracker says that Homer leads the NL in ‘just enough’ home runs, with 10, total (tied with Randy Wolf and Mike Minor). No doubt, there’s some bad luck in all the home run balls that have floated out of Great American for Bailey. On the other hand, he’s still allowed 11 “plenty” home runs, which is still not a great number (but no “no doubters”).

I think it’s clear that Bailey’s been at least a little lucky away, and a little unlucky at home. In comparison, his career home hr/9 rate is at a much more reasonable 1.35, and his away hr/9 is a much less impressive 0.83. Perhaps we can hope/be disappointed in his return to career norms. Actually, that 1.35 HR/9 works out to about 1 HR in a 6 inning appearance, so maybe this afternoon’s performance was a regression to the mean.

Wait, Homer was terrible today. Fiddlesticks.

That’s…not how to baseball, Homer. (Photo by Keith Allison/Flickr)

Tonight, Homer did an amazing job – keeping the Reds in a game that most of the offense didn’t so much feel like joining. Thankfully, he threw 8 innings of 1-run baseball, including 10 strikeouts and no walks. The Brewers, who have a decent offense, managed only 6 hits, and 1 XBH in the game. That performance, and solo home runs by Cozart, Bruce, and Rolen were enough to earn us the win.

If you had told me this off-season that Homer Bailey would be the one helping Johnny Cueto nail down the starting pitching rotation  the week after the All-Star break, I would have smirked and maybe sighed wistfully before making a non-committal remark like “Well, I certainly hope so.”

It’s not that I’ve ever really disliked Homer, but even objectively knowing that he’s still only 26 (just a few months older than me), when many pitchers don’t peak until a few years after that, it does wear on you when you see a top prospect like Homer struggle for many years in a row. Unfortunately, things sometimes just don’t turn out the way you think they ought to, and we certainly were getting more from Bailey than we got from Jeremy Sowers or Homer Bailey.

Afterall, we’ve had hopeful little bouts of excellence from Homer now and then. He was pretty good in the last part of last year, and the last part of the year after that, and a revelatory performance in the beginning of 2009 down in Louisville inspired this article on Homer’s new miracle split-finger fastball, learned from Bats teammate Justin Lehr. Although they’re classified as the same, you can tell from 2008 to 2009 where he switched from a shaky and inconsistent changeup to the split finger fastball, which he seems to command better.

This year, though, the human classification system that Brooks Baseball uses say that Bailey’s added a two-seamer or sinker to his recipe – a fast pitch that comes in a little on lefties, which, like, the splitter, he mostly uses on lefties. Pitch f/x says that he threw a two-seam fastball last year, too, but there may seem to be a little different going on between this year and last.

If Bailey has been able to add something to help him deal with left handed batters, that might help explain his recent success. So far, his 2012 splits have right handers OPSing .837 against him, and lefties .663. But that’s probably just small sample size.

Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s maturity. But for now, at least, I’m just happy to see it.

(Photo by Wknight94 at wikimedia commons)

What a nightmare of a game. You know, for a win.

Homer Bailey had a pretty great start. 4 runs isn’t awesome, but only 2 earned is. One error by Bailey, and one by Bruce were a little problematic, but Bailey did a decent job of keeping things away from the defense by striking out 8 batters over his 6 2/3 innings. And the offense had a nice night – both Heisey and Stubbs popped homers. And Bailey himself got himself an RBI double.

Homer and I also have the bullpen to rage at. Given two outs, and men on 1st and 2nd, Arredondo came in to immediately give up a single and a run. Then, Marshall had a tricky 8th, giving up a run, to narrow the lead to a single run. Thankfully for him, Ondrusek came in and managed to grab one final out.

The top of the 9th was really an exercise in management hilarity. Dusty isn’t at all to blame for the bullpen melting down. Afterall, Arredondo and Marshall are usually in the half of the bullpen that can get a few outs without giving up most of a three run lead. Pinch-hitting Miguel Cairo is really bizarre though. Cairo used to be our reliable go-to guy to hit for the relief pitchers, but his .152 average this year isn’t cutting it.

And then Cozart tried to bunt his way onto first base. It didn’t work.

All of this is, of course, the perfect set up for the bottom of the 9th. We’ve got a one run lead. Our bullpen has nearly blown the lead twice already. And in walks Aroldis Chapman. Still one of the best closers in baseball, but coming off a month that certainly was not as good as his first month in the closer’s seat.

And Aroldis delivers. Triple digit heat. Pounding the zone. Amarista: strikeout. Headley: strikeout. Quentin: strikeout.

Fin