The C-ing Red Puppy is really into the Giro d’Italia right now and has not even been watching the Reds. BAD DOG.

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about the Reds. In related news, moving sucks.

While I’ve been keeping an eye on the Reds in my absence, I have been a bit distracted, and really, it seems like we’ve had a lot of bad news – Ludwick went out while I was still paying attention, but then we had Johnny Cueto and Ryan Hanigan go on the DL, and also Manny Parra (…oh noooooo..) and Nick Masset (…what a surpriiiiiiise…). Also, from what I’ve been hearing, Jay Bruce is the worst baseball player in the history of the galaxy, and Zack Cozart’s number two hitting has been condemned by the Catholic Church (that new pope is so cray-cray!)

Yet, we seem to be doing alright. 19-15 is pretty good. I can live with it. It probably doesn’t justify how cocky we were before the season started, but I’m not sure what would have justified how cocky we were at the beginning of the season (a Nobel Peace Prize, maybe?). I mean I said “Oh guys, we’ll be pretty good, but let’s not get out of hand,” but you know in my head I was like “YEAH WE’RE THE BEST SCREW THE NATS AND THE DODGERS AND THE GIANTS WE’RE BETTER THAN Y’ALL DON’T EVEN FORGET IT.” So, yeah. We haven’t been that good.

We are doing spectacularly ok, though, and I’d like to take a few minutes to thank the Reds who have picked up the slack for their teammates.Mat Latos: Latos has gone just over 6 inning on average in his seven starts, but they’ve been pretty awesome innings. His worst start so far was probably  his last- Sunday’s afternoon game against the Cubs – but even that was hardly terrible. I also like the way he’s striking out a lot of batters, not walking very man, and being especially sparing with the home runs. The HR number might regress a bit, but it’s a good recipe for success none the less.

Tony Cingrani: Cingrani’s done as much as a 23-year-old called up to the big leagues on an emergency basis can do, and more. He probably won’t striket out 12 batters per 9 innings for his career, but hey, if he can ride a bit of luck out for the next few months, we could very well have a ROY candidate at the end of the year.

Shin Soo Choo: Shin Soo Choo is the greatest ever, and we now have mathematical proof.  He leads the Reds in basically every category – inching out Joey Votto in average and on-base, and outpacing him by a much bigger stretch in power. I thought that Choo would be able to grab some more home runs in Great American, since it’s a little smaller, and the left field wall is a lot lower – in a very limited sample size: I was totally, right.

Joey Votto: Is still awesome. Who cares how many runs he drives in? NO ONE WITH TASTE OR DISCERNMENT. (J/K, guys, j/k. (Actually, I’m not kidding, I mean it.) I am a bit sad that he’s no longer on pace to walk 230 times. That would’ve been totally rad.

Ok, now I’ve got to go write a fake movie preview where the Tampa Bay Rays were the ones behind the European airport diamond heist in order to get enough money to build a time machine and bring back young Wade Boggs. And then somehow convince him he plays for the Rays.

Photo by Keith Allison/Flickr

Incidentally, I still hate the Cardinals, of course, but at this point it’s pretty much for the fun of it. Tony LaRussa is gone. Chris Carpenter is (sorta?) gone. Other jerks are gone. The dichotomy of terrible fans who call themselves the best fans in baseball and mediocre/good fans who pretend those other fans don’t exist and insist that no Cardinals fans actually refer to the BFIB title while subtly (or not so subtly) implying that they are indeed better than other teams’ fans …. that is still tiring. But in the scheme of shitty fanbase drama, it’s really not remarkable. I’m probably way worse, objectively, just complaining about it as much as I do.

But still. The Cardinals are stupid and dumb, because it’s fun to say so. Losing to the Cardinals? Doubly stupid and trebly dumb. That’s why it was no nice to not lose yesterday. Losing today was not so good, especially when things went off the rails so suddenly, and then slowly slipped beyond saving. But here at C-ing Red, we actually don’t like scapegoats and sadness and talking about how the Reds weren’t good.

• Bronson Arroyo’s 5 inning of perfect baseball – I mean, yeah, it would’ve been better if it were, say, 9 innings of perfect baseball, but you take what you can get. Arroyo’s eventual 6 IP and 4 runs allowed is not ideal by any means, but Bronson’s not as young as you used to be, and you’ve gotta take what you can get. A little excitement in innings 4 and 5? Hey, why not.

• JJ Hoover didn’t pitch today. Get that kid some rest. Dang. Really, we only used Parra out of the bullpen, so that gives as good a chance as any in tomorrow’s rubber match – featuring Jake Westbrook and Homer Bailey.

• Joey Votto got on base. That extends his streak to 8 games – which is, incidentally, all of the games we’ve played. The remarkable thing is that Shin Soo Choo also got on base today, which matches Joey (on-base streaks don’t cross seasons). 8 games is not that remarkable – Joey’s had much longer streaks, obviously, but it’s kinda cool to have two guys to start off the season. The Reds offense has been pretty consistent from that point of view – Brandon Phillips and Todd Frazier each have gotten hits in 6 out of the Reds 8 total games.

• 5-3 is really pretty good. And more than that, playing the Cardinals definitely feels like just playing another team, this year- I don’t think there’s any (or very much) emotional baggage tied to the Cards series at this point.  I’m glad if we win and sad if we lose (Because, as stated early, the Cardinals are stupid and dumb), but that’s all there is to it.

(Photo by Keith Allison)

No, not the Cincinnati Reds rotation, as we already know about Choo’s 4 career home runs against Bronson Arroyo, and the two he hit against Mike Leake last year should probably speak for themselves. Thankfully, a full-time move to Great American should offset any hitting stats he loses from not facing Bronson Arroyo for one or two games every year.

After hearing about Choo’s bat heating up in Arizona of late – his 10 hits lead the team right now – I was thinking more about how Choo will look in our lineup. I mean, hey, if Jay Bruce likes him, who can complain, but, still, while I’ve been exceptionally excited about the Shin-Soo Choo era, his numbers might not stand out to your average viewer – he’s not putting up Mike Trout superstar batting stats.

So, I wanted to take a look and see where Choo measured up with the Reds 2012 lineup – so I compared him to the ten Reds who got 300 PA or more last season

• Mostly due to playing time, Choo would have led the team in hits, been second in singles (to BP) and doubles (to Votto), and would’ve placed 5th in HR. It’s possible that Choo will swat a few more in GABP in 2013, but we were 3rd in the NL in homers last year, so we probably didn’t need to improve our home-run power very much.
• With 73 BB, he would be second to Votto in both walks and walk rate. (Incidentally, we were 9th in the NL in walks)
• For slash line lovers – he would’ve been 2nd in average, 2nd in OBP, and 5th in slugging
• While Choo would have been 2nd on the 2012 Reds (and that’s still including Stubbs), he doesn’t fair nearly as well in more comprehensive numbers. Speed Score would only put him as 4th on the Reds, and fangraphs’ ‘Universal Base Running’ number has him a “-1.2″, which puts him above only Rolen, Votto and Bruce
• His 2012 Line Drive % would’ve ranked 3rd on the Reds behind Votto, and just behind Ludwick, while his IFFB% (also known as – the thing Joey Votto is REALLY GOOD at not doing) – was just 2.6%, easily second behind Joey.
• Choo doesn’t have a very contact rate, putting him in the bottom half of reds regulars/semi-regulars in 2012. On the other hand, that’s also where Jay Bruce, Todd Frazier and Ryan Ludwick all were, so that’s not so bad. We can’t all be Ryan Hanigan, after all.

Well, obviously Choo’s patience is the asset that we should be looking forward to. He’s not totally without power, but he won’t stand out on the 2013 Reds – but, again, we didn’t really need to add a lot of power.  When you compare his OBP to what he’s replacing, in Drew Stubbs …. Choo has his fair share of strikeouts, but it’s going to have a way different feel.

Let’s be honest, I’m just super excited, and wanted to talk about Shin-Soo Choo again.

Pretty sure Choo is the hatless kid in the back. No idea on which one is Lee.

For your daily dose of Choo news – earlier this week, it was announced that Look Asia, a movie production company has signed contracts with Shin-Soo Choo and Dae-Ho Lee, currently with they Orix Buffaloes, to make a movie about the Korean team that won the 2000 18U Baseball World Championship in Edmonton, Canada. The movie, currently called “Edmonton Kids”  will also focus on the later development of Choo and Lee, who is a former KBO triple crown winner. Both players grew up as talented baseball players in Busan at the same time, making them friends and rivals.

At the time, Choo was a top pitcher, and won both the MVP and Best Pitcher awards for the tournament. I don’t think there are complete records available anywhere on the web, but apparently the gold medal game between South Korea and the U.S. was something special. Though the US went up early 4-0, the Koreans won it 9-7 in a brutal 13 inning, 4- hour struggle. (Link to the Edmonton International Baseball Foundation website). Players on the 2000 US Junior squad include JJ Hardy, Brandon League, and Joe Mauer (who OPsed  1.566 over the course of the tournament). I don’t have any stats for the Korean side, but Shin-Soo Choo apparently struck out 33 batters over the team’s 8 games. (Has anyone ever asked Mauer or Choo if they faced each other as teenagers – you know, since they played against each other in the AL Central for so many years?)

The article also says they signed with both players’ teams, but I don’t know if they also includes the Reds, and if they movie will include any of Choo’s time with the Reds. Still, it seems like a pretty good watch, if there ends up being an English subtitle.

In other news, you know what I did find? I found Shin-Soo Choo’s high school stats! I know, How useless is that? Super useless. But still.

First, I want to introduce this segment with a screen cap of the amazingness of google translate. One, tee-hee! Two, you can see that Choo wore 17 in high school, too.

Here are Choo’s stats as a pitcher.  FYI, I think these are just the major tournaments, and are not totally complete. (You can read a little more on Korean HS baseball on wiki.)

Note the 87 Ks, 36 BB, and 15 HBP in 74 innings in his final year. Busan-go won the President’s Cup Championship that year, and Choo got the win in four of the team’s five game, which, incidentally, occurred over the course of about 9 days.

And here’s the hitting stats:

Choo’s patience and power are  clearly not a recent development. However, if these stats are at least complete for these tournaments, his base-stealing is. Maybe that’s just not how the high school game is played in Korea. It also makes me wonder about Korean player development. Lately, the US tends to concentrate on the pitchers from NPB and KBO. This meshes philosophically with the  NPB’s love for foreign power hitters, like our old friend Wladimir Balentien. But, the KBO’s foreign players are almost all pitchers, like our old friend Ben Jukich.

I’m not totally sure how true it is that Mariners scouts signed Choo primarily as a pitcher, but how crazy is that? Choo’s HS hitting numbers look pretty great to me, and now he’s the most successful Korean hitter in MLB history. But he was scouted and signed as a pitcher.

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.

Hey, remember when there was a Shin-Soo Choo AND Adam Dunn 80s bobbleheads, and I wrote 500 words about it?

This won’t really be a long post about lineup construction. Plenty of pixels have been spent on the subject during Dusty Baker’s reign in the Queen City. Plus, mathematically speaking, the best lineups are completely ridiculous. Maybe LaRussa could get away with batting the pitcher 8^th, but Dusty would never and probably could never bat Votto lead-off, with the pitcher sixth in the order. I wouldn’t even want that, no matter what the optimization algorithm says.

That’s not to say that I haven’t had some serious concerns about Dusty’s lineups, but I have high hopes for this season. In 2012, though, the ‘most common’ lineup was used for seven games: (according to baseball reference)

Cozart

Stubbs

Votto

Phillips

Bruce

Ludwick

Frazier

Hanigan

Pitcher

According to that old lineup analysis tool, which isn’t exactly brilliant, but is a lot of fun to play with, that lineup would produce an average of 4.53 runs per game, with the 2012 season numbers of each player plugged in.  (I used Bronson Arroyo’s 2012 numbers in the pitcher spot, as they were sort of average for our starters). The actual Reds throughout the season produced about 4.12 runs per game – but that lineup was sort of last year’s best case lineup anyway. A lot of other games had Votto out entirely, or Rolen, Heisey, Cairo, or Mesoraco subbed in. That lineup analysis tool also had the best lineup scoring ~4.8 runs per game – but again, it creates a pretty ridiculous looking lineup.

With Shin-soo Choo in the fold to lead-off, we now have a guy who can really get on-base in the number one spot, but who has enough speed to please Dusty. I’m also hoping that having Ludwick and Frazier providing some more reliable power, Dusty could hit Phillips second and put Cozart in the back of the lineup with Hanigan, giving us: Choo, Phillips, Votto, Frazier, Bruce, Ludwick, Cozart, Hanigan, Pitcher. I mean, we can’t actually expect him to hit Votto and Bruce next to each other.

In the Lineup Analysis tool, that lineup (using Bill James projections) would produce 4.80 runs per game. Over 162 games, that’s a difference of over 40 runs. That’s pretty good. It’s not quite the ‘optimized’ lineup – but it’s a lot closer. The ‘best’ lineup of those players generated ~4.9 runs per game – and also featured Choo in the leadoff spot . (Even the worst possible lineup projects at about 4.46 runs per game.)  That’s not nearly as big a gap as between the actual and ‘best’ in 2012. Cozart and Stubbs both made up or at least partially made up for shoddy hitting with excellent defense, but they definitely killed us at the top of the order last year.

I know this kind of lineup analysis is pretty passe, but I guess what I’m saying is: Shin-Soo Choo is good news for the lineup, for the offense, and for the Reds.

Let’s get another ‘C’ on that cap, Oppa. (Photo by Keith Allison/Wikimedia Commons)

EDIT: The deal is done. Yess.

If you’ve read anything by me. Or if you know me at all. Or if you’ve heard of me from a friend (unlikely), you probably know that the Reds acquiring Shin-Soo Choo is probably the fondest dream in my tiny little heart. Choo, who was signed as an amateur free agent out of South Korea by the Mariners, has been holding down right field in Cleveland on a regular basis since 2009. Choo has been said to be on the market since the winter meetings, but the rumors involving Choo and the Reds really just started developing today – Ken Rosenthal recently had this to say on twitter:

Three-team trade, per source, will look like this: Choo, Jason Donald to #Reds, Gregorius to #Diamondbacks, Stubbs, AZ pitcher to #Indians.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 12, 2012

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!! (And Jon Heyman confirms it’s a done deal! Still Squee!)

Now, ok, so the deal may not get done exactly like this. But no matter what, know that I am completely incapable of putting down any kind of rational evaluation here. A few notes though: (1) this would put Shin-Soo Choo in centerfield, which is certainly not optimal, but you have to love his OBP in the leadoff spot, and (2) Jason Donald is a comparatively uninspiring 28-year old infielder, who I assume can do a pretty adequate job in Miguel Cairo’s old role.

So, instead of trying to evaluate this trade (Current evaluation: wheeeeEEEEEeeeeeeeeEEeee!!), I’ll just try to be a semi-repository of Shin-Soo Choo VAGUELY INTERESTING FACTS ™.

First of all, I want to promote some Shin-Soo Choo cheering options. First of all is the classic, of saying “Fighting!” after his name.  Here is an overly long video in English, that tries to explain the whole ‘Figh-ting’ thing. Also, when Choo was on the Korean Celebrity…Adventure…Gameshow(?) called Running  Man, the other contestants brought up the whole idea that people might cheer “Go Choo!” in English, either here, or in Korea to support Choo’s U.S. career. Well, Gochu, in korean, is the word for spicy pepper – which you might know if you do any Korean cooking, and bought any gochujang (fermented pepper paste). So when I’m not calling him Shin-Soo Oppaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, I might start calling him “Red Pepper.” Is it lame? Yes! Is it the kind of dumb pun that really amuses me? Also, yes!

Here’s some other notes:

• That episode of running man is kind of amusing, really, and features both Choo, and Hyun-Jin Ryu, the Dodgers newest starting pitcher. You can watch it for free, with english subtitles here. The best part is where they’re playing ‘Superpowers Baseball’, with tennis balls and aluminum bats, and someone makes Choo bat with a tiny wooden stick (called a laundry stick?). Choo still hits a tennis-ball line-drive. Also, he bunts against ‘Ryu. (Worst part: the repetitive ‘reaction’ track, and replaying Choo’s HR against Leake over and over again.)
• You may also remember that Choo came up in my random Korean drama post a few months ago, which had a character tell 1997 Shin-Soo Choo to stick to pitching. Well, since then, I’ve learned that the actor portraying Shin-Soo is actually his brother, who is an actor named Min-Ki Choo. (Link is Korean Wiki, but google-auto-translate works pretty well.)
• Choo is married, with two cute sons. (EDIT: Apparently he has three kids, per ESPN, as of February 2012)
• Choo also comes from a baseball family. His uncle is Park Jeong-Tae (another Korean wiki link), a long-time second baseman for the Lotte Giants in the 90s. Park won five golden gloves for the Busan KBO team, and led the league in doubles, once.
• He comes from Busan, which is a huge baseball town. the hometown Giants lead the league in attendance, because Busan people love baseball. He went to Busan High School, and pitched very well. He also won the Best Pitcher award while playing for Korea at the 2000 Junior World Baseball Championships. He said that he could throw 153 kph/95 mph, occasionally, at least, which explains his solid assist numbers in right. Here is Choo in high school:

The text refers to Choo’s father’s intense training regimen finally paying off.

• There’s actually some translated interview material here, with more pics, that’s pretty interesting. Choo seems pretty honest about his family concerns, and what life was like in the minor leagues for him.
• You can check out some of his Korean commercials here on youtube.
• You may know that South Korean men are expected to complete a standard two year military service requirement, and it’s considered pretty shameful to dodge – not to mention you can be arrested if you come back to the country. But Choo got his exemption when Korea won the Asian games, so he’s good on that front.
• Of course, it’s not all good. Last year, Choo got caught on a DUI, which, let’s be clear is totally, 1000% not ok. Hopefully, he’s left that behind him.