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.

He’s a great fifth starter…and an awesome dancer. (Photo by Keith Allison/Flickr)

Last off-season, I took a look at the ERA+ distribution of the ‘rotations’ of all the MLB teams, and updated it partially through this season. Now with the season over, I’m redoing the numbers. Once again, the methodology was basically: top five pitchers on each team by numbers of game started, then sorted by ERA+. Now, there are a couple problems, due to the stranger rotations we’ve got going on, but that’s restricted to a couple of teams. Very few teams have a consistent fifth starter throughout the year, as well, but as I said in the earlier post, I think this is still the best basic approach to get at this concept.

Of course, I also realized that I had accidentally used the mean, when I meant to use the median, but now I’ve fixed that.

The thing that is nice is that the two sets of numbers from 2011 and 2012 line up very well. This actually is pretty expected, given that ERA+ is adjusted to league average every year. Unless the comparative numbers of awesome and terrible pitchers shift, the averages should all come back to about the same level.

Here’s the comparison:

Unlike in 2011, the Reds had an excellent rotation in 2012. Cueto, Latos, Arroyo, Bailey, and Leake were one of only three rotations where every pitcher was in the top quartile for their ‘position’, along with the Rays and the Tigers. It’s unsurprising, as the strength of the rotation has been an obvious strong point to this team all year long.

While Cueto and, to lesser extents, Bailey, Latos, and Arroyo have been great and acclaimed as such, Mike Leake did suck a little bit. But I don’t think he’s given enough credit for how little he sucked. Mike Leaked suck less than the vast majority of fifth-best starters, and he did so all year long. Yes, Mike Leake allowed kind a lot of runs, but he was pitching in Great American Ball Park, and overall, he gave the Reds as good a chance to win the game as we could probably expect, every fifth days.

Also, he’s young. We pay him barely anything and there’s tons of possibility for improvement. I mean, there hasn’t really been a lot of Leake criticism, but there shouldn’t be any at all. He’s the best! (…fifth starter.) (Ok, the fifth best.)

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.

Yep, I’m still on that Cueto-not-Chapman-for-Cy-Young, kick. (Photo by David Slaughter/Flickr)

Today, fangraphs unrolled some new pitching metrics that will help those of us who are mildly frustrated with the emphasis on defense independent pitching statistics (DIPS). As most of us are fans of Johnny Cueto, who is almost certainly underrated by FIP/xFIP/WAR, that would be most of us.

The most basic of these is RA9-Wins. It essentially takes your the pitcher’s absolute performance in allowing runs and calculates it on a WAR scale based on the innings pitched, and provides a park and league adjustment. This is great for people who totally reject DIPS, but want a single number to compare pitching quality and quantity between players (while correcting for home park). As Dave Cameron notes, most of acknowledge that while WAR undershoots a pitcher’s ability to control aspects of run prevention that aren’t BB/K/Hr, this probably overshoots.

The new calculation is the BIP-wins, which calculates the wins above replacement that comes from a pitcher’s BABIP. It uses linear weights for singles and doubles. LOB-wins, which should look at the value of how at-bat results are sequenced is just a catch-all – just Ra9-W minus WAR minus BIP-wins. Together, fangraphs is calling LOB -wins and BIP-wins Fielding Dependent Pitching, or FDP. So FIP and FDP combines to look at all the aspects of run prevention. We know that FIP is all under the pitcher’s control, we’re not totally sure about FDP, but some of it is attributable to the pitcher.

Now for the Johnny Cueto part. Just looking at Johnny’s ERA and WAR, gives you an idea that WAR may be underrating Cueto. Cueto doesn’t have the best peripherals (other than HR), but has managed to have one of the lowest ERA/the lowest in the league for almost two seasons now, and that’s in a very hitter-friendly park. He’s a bit of a ground-ball pitcher – but not like Trevor Cahill or anything. At a 49% groundball rate, he ranks in the top half of MLB pitchers, but is number one among Reds starters.

So I looked at some of the new pitcher value numbers for some of the major NL Cy Young contenders:

Johnny leads in RA9-wins, obviously, as Cueto has made all his starts, and done so with the lowest ERA in the league. Once adjusted for park though, Cueto’s advantage looks enormous. Cueto’s improved his WAR outlook recently, but he’s still second to Clayton Kershaw, though he’s put some distance on the other contenders, like R.A. Dickey.  So what’s the difference between Cueto’s RA9-wins dominance and WAR-not-so-dominance.

Cueto actually doesn’t have a very low BABIP, partially a consequence of the groundballs. That shows up in his BIP-wins number which is low, at about 0.2. Most of the difference for Cueto is coming from LOB-wins, that catch all stat. Cueto’s LOB% is at 79.7% right now, which is fairly high. This may be a little luck, a little clutchiness, and probably something to do with Cueto not allowing a lot of extra base hits. Allowing more singles means that more base-runners will get on, but not as many will score. And Cueto’s SLG against number is fantastic. At .335, it’s number three in the NL (behind Gio Gonzalez and Clayon Kershaw).

But that LOB-wins number can anything else relevant to preventing runs. It may be a little hard to think of many more things that are relevant, but when you’re talking about Johnny Cueto, I can think of a big one.  Baserunners. I’ve discussed before how Cueto is number one (with a bullet) at not allowing runners. This year is another point in Cueto’s favor. So far, Johnny’s allowed one stolen base, compared to 8 caught stealing – on seven pickoffs. That pickoffs number is good enough for second in MLB. But even though Clayton Kershaw has 8 pickoffs, he also has 8 stolen bases allowed while pitching.

Altogether, Cueto could probably considered the best stolen-base preventing pitcher in MLB right now, and that could definitely be showing up in that LOB-wins statistic. It’s also a good argument for contributing a little more of that FDP to Cueto. Even a little bit would boost Cueto above his competition in wins. Just listening in to places like MLB Network, I definitely think the national media is considering Cueto a CYA front-runner. C’mon Johnny, just throw a few perfect games this September, and there won’t be any debate.

EDIT: If you want to read a somewhat/vastly better treatment of this subject, you should probably head on over to fangraphs to read Dave Cameron’s article. (I note that mine was published first, only to defend myself from claims of plagiarism.)

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.

Yep, I’m still on that Cueto-not-Chapman-for-Cy-Young, kick. (Photo by David Slaughter/Flickr)

So, I’m gonna bust a chart at you that’s absolutely insane. It’s so big, I had to bust it into two separate image files before the blog would even let me load it up.

It’s also not that useful. But I think it’s a pretty way to look at how the Cy Young Award has changed over the years. Here’s the basic premise: I took every Cy Young Award winner, and looked at where they ranked among qualifying pitchers in that year and league for a handful of stats – from the very traditional to more ‘new=age’ statistics. I used percentile rank, so ’1′ or ’0′ is the league leader depending on whether it’s better for the stat to be high or low – those are all marked in red. Being in the top five %ile is marked in orange, and in the top 10% is marked in yellow. It’s a little problematic, because if you have enough individuals tied for the league lead, then none of them are considered in the ’100 %ile’ category. Without further ado: here you go.

I will make a couple general points, here.

• WAR has turned into a pretty nice indicator of Cy Young status. That makes sense, as it’s a stat that aggregrates other statistics and rewards pitchers who throw a lot of innings, well. Essentially, that’s what the Cy Young is all about, right? But it’s worth noting that that wasn’t the case, for years. WAR encapsulates what we think is important in pitchers now, and by ‘we’, that does include the baseball writers, these days.
• In fact, in the last ten years, WAR is a better indicator of the Cy Young award winner than any single stat. Again – sensible, because it’s aggregates good stats, but in the 19 winners since 2002 (not including Eric Gagne, because let’s not add that complication), the leader in WAR has won more often than the leader in ERA, the leader in strikeouts, or the leader in wins. Let’s be real, though, it’s still only correct about half the time.
• Speaking of which, Wins is losing the dominance it once held of the Cy Young Award. The wins leader still frequently wins the Cy Young, but it doesn’t hurt that the wins leader is still frequently very good at baseball. But Felix Hernandez wasn’t even in the top half of qualified pitchers in wins, and he still got his – that was the first time that had ever happened.
• Interestingly, since 2005, each winner has either led the league in ERA or in WAR.
• Of course, this still misses a lot of the voting dynamics that change so much from year to year. Like the 2011 NL award: Clayton Kershaw might have beat Roy Halladay because he had two more wins (and a magic 20+ wins season), or because he had a phenomenal strikeout rate – but it probably wasn’t because his ERA was 0.07 lower than Halladay’s. A bunch of orange and red boxes can only tell you so much.

So what does that tell us about Johnny Cueto?

» Continue reading “Johnny Cueto And Cy Young Trends, Part 2: The WAR”

For those of you not in the know, aka, the other 6 billion and something people on the planet who aren’t me – that’s ‘Probable Pitchers Preview’. And it seems like the Indians are slowly moving away from the old Chief Wahoo images, which, honestly, I just don’t want to have to look at that thing anymore. The less I see it the better.

L’anyhoodle, since we only see the Indians once a year, I thought it was extra worth it to take a little look at who the Reds will be facing this weekend, pitching-wise. (Offense-wise: SHIN SHOO OPPPPPPAAAAAAAAA!!! …who is doing ok, I guess, but has apparently forgotten how power works.) Currently, though the Indians are are only half a game back in the AL Central, their pitching has struggled – at 4.69 R/G they’re at an impressive 25th best in the MLB.

Tuesday: Jeanmar Gomez

Gomez is a reasonably promising young pitcher. Just 24, he started about 20 games for the Indians in 2010 and 2011, before joining the MLB rotation full-time this year. Gomez relies on a 90 mph sinker, which runs in on right handed hitters. He compliments the sinker with a changeup that moves a lot like the sinker, just about 7 mph slower, and a slider that tends to go all over. Sliders can be hard to pin down, but Gomez’s is kind of all over the place when it comes to movement.  He also moves arm angles, though not on the level, of course, Arroyo.

He hasn’t been the most successful in 2012, with a near 5.00 ERA, and that’s with his BABIP at a kind of low .265, which is the lowest among Indians starters. When Gomez has the sinker working, he can be pretty okay, but he’s coming off three consecutive bad starts – he’s allowed 17 ER in 15 2/3 innings. He also doesn’t strike out very many, so this seems like as good an opportunity of any of these games.

Wednesday: Derek Lowe

Lowe’s not exactly a stranger in these parts, after pitching the last 7 years in the NL. Lowe’s currently the most successful starter for the Indians, with a 3.72 ERA. He still relies principally on his sinker, but unlike Gomez, he’s been doing an amazing job of inducing groundballs – at 64.2%, Lowe has the highest groundball rate in the majors. It means he has a somewhat high BABIP, but also a low HR rate.

I kind of feel like Lowe is the kind of pitcher we’ll have the most trouble with – which may or may not be aided by copious amounts of small-ball. We’ll score 2 or 3 runs – it remains to see whether Mike Leake will hold the Indians to less than that.

Thursday: Josh Tomlin

I feel like Josh Tomlin still has some promise. He’s a little old for ‘promise’, now that he’s 27, but his peripherals are actually pretty good – especially that BB/9 under 2. Now in 2012, he’s still got good peripherals, but hasn’t totally delivered. Part of that is probably his high .306 BABIP, and another part is probably his HR tendencies, which have never been great. He also spent a couple weeks on the DL in May.

Tomlin’s got a fun pitch repertoire – he throws his four-seamer in the low 90s, with a sinker (for lefties) and a cut-fastball (for righties), as well as changeup (for lefties), and a curve-ball.

He also has some crazy arm angle things, going on – but there may be away to read his pitches – his curveball, for example, it looks like he throws from the top – much higher than most of his other pitches. With  a lot of exposure, the Reds may be able to use that, but on short acquaintance, it might work really well.

I decided to update my look at 1/2/3/4/5 starters, which I first did a couple months ago, here. These numbers are just for a quarter of a season, so there are obviously some sample size issues, especially as teams finalize their rotations and suffer various amounts of injuries. (The Minnesota Twins, for example, have three starters with an ERA+ of 48. Yikes.) Here’s a comparison of the current medians compared to the 2011 medians

• Ace:
• 2012: 148
•  2011: 130
• No. 2: 2
• 2012: 120
• 2011: 109
• No. 3:
• 2012:103
• 2011: 102
• No. 4:
• 2012: 88
• 2011: 91
• No. 5:
• 2012: 74
• 2011: 80

You can sort of tell that this is a matter of regression as the ace and No.2 numbers are higher than a full season’s worth of data, and the No. 4 and No. 5 are lower. Other than that, ERA+ should normalize any differences in the season, unless the pitching distribution really changes.

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you that the Reds rotation is doing a lot better than they did last season. (I gave them a participation ribbon.) Let’s see how the rotations tend to stack up.

Clearly, the Reds show up in blue a lot more on this particular graph, which is good, because as I’m starting to see, actually terrible rotations can’t get you very far in the wins column. 3 of the Reds 5 starters profile as above average (if maybe not in the order we originally predicted), and the other two are merely not-so-good, rather than “terrible”.

Makes you feel bad though, for the Rockies, as their ‘Ace’ is worse than the Nationals’ No. 5 guy.

I bow down to you, Bronson. (Photo by DavidMeyersPhotos on Flickr)

Although Arroyo’s start yesterday only looks “pretty great” from a runs scored perspective, by any other definition it was a work of art. In eight innings, Arroyo allowed only 5 hits, and zero walks, with one ROE to the Cards. It was sort of bad luck that the home run came with two runners on base, especially as it was the only extra base hit for St. Louis in the entire game. (He also struck out five.)

Even though Bronson was facing a slightly squishier version of the normal Cardinals lineup up, without Berkman (for the foreseeable future), Molina, or Freese, when you look at his pitches, it’s not hard to imagine him facing down the best lineup in baseball without suffering too much damage. Brooksbaseball already has all the data from today’s game, and any way you look at it, this was an impressive start – 90 pitches in eight innings is pretty telling in and of itself.

» Continue reading “Bronson Arroyo’s Finesse Pitching Master Class”

Photo by SD Dirk on Flickr

I’m writing this after tonight’s game, which I will gloss over. There really isn’t a lot to say about an 11-1 loss. The offense sucked, the pitching sucked. For once, I didn’t care when Willie Harris came into the game. Pretty much no one can even complain about Dusty tonight, which is the favorite hobby of many, as it’s not like any minor managerial adjustments would have made a difference in the game outcome.

So instead, let’s talk about a guy who hasn’t pitched in, oh, three days: Mr. Aroldis Chapman. Now, we’ve all done plenty of talking about what’s going on with Chapman, but his use thus far is interesting. In the first 10 games of the season, Chapman appeared in five games, pitching eight innings. For those of you, gentle readers, who are excellent at math, realize that this could mean many different combinations of outings and one of them is two outings where he pitched one inning, and three outings where he pitched 2. That is the one that happened.

That’s a lot more poly-inning appearances than in 2011 – where Chapman had three 2 inning outings all year, and out of 54 games he appeared in, he pitched in more than 1.0 innings only 8 times. Plus, if you go back to where we were after Sunday night’s game, Chapman would have been on pace to pitch over 120 innings, which hasn’t been done by a reliever in actually kind of a long time, and double Chapman’s innings count last year. I feel like there are maybe two main, non-exclusive explanations for this.

• The organization wants to keep Aroldis on track to start later sometime later on. Keeping pitch counts up would probably be getting Chapman back into the rotation in the middle of the season. But if we think that Chapman is going to spend the whole year in the bullpen, pitching more innings might help a little, but that’s maybe a little Verducci effect reliant, which given that I’m pretty skeptical of it, I don’t know how much the Reds buy into it. How much of a difference is it going to make if we’re transitioning Chapman from a bunch of frequent, short appearances to pitching many innings every five days, than if we’re transitioning him from a bunch of frequent, slightly longer appearances to pitching as a starter? In either case, I would assume that the difference in the two types of pitching has the potential to put some stress on Chapman’s arm.

• The slightly more rational approach might just be that we’ve needed him to pitch a lot as he and Sam Lecure are in better shape to throw more than one inning than the rest of the pen, since they were starting in spring training. We have had a lot of extra inning games, a lot of close games, a shaky rotation, and a ‘pen that’s not going on all cylinders.

The fact that we haven’t seen Chapman in the last two games, maybe makes me slightly more inclined to the latter. That is, I suspect Baker was using Chapman in the first two weeks just to fill the needs of the team as he saw fit, and then (perhaps with some help) realized that it was resulting in an unsustainable workload, and has thus backed off of using him. Or, it’s simply what Dusty said, and he didn’t want to use Chapman on the second day after pitching two innings. (Didn’t stop him last Friday, but, ok.) And didn’t want him to pitch today, because, well, duh, what’s the point. And there is no plan for how to use Chapman in a way that’s best for the organization both now and in the future.

In other news, I still feel bad for Bill Bray. I mean, at this point, he’s probably better off being told he has a terrible injury, so he can justify his terrible performances to himself, you know, assuming he isn’t in fact terribly injured right now.