Last night, Mike Leake allowed no hits to the Philadelphia Phillies up until the seventh inning, when Maikel Franco hit a single, ending Tucker Barnhardt's bid to be the first non-Ryan Hanigan to catch a Reds no hitter since 1988. We later lost that game thanks to some awful fielding and bullpen pitching, giving us our second loss in a row - the Reds worst losing streak in the last 100 hours.
Ryan Hanigan has inspired today's arbitrary and pointless graph of the day!
By my calculation, if we had Ryan Hanigan on the team, we would throw over six times as many no-hitters. I mean, that's 0 so far in 2015, and 0 times 6 is..., well anyway. (Yes, Ryan Hanigan is technically injured and out until after the All-Star break, but I'm using a very sophisticated rhetorical technique called "ignoring that".)
The New Jersey media market was kind enough to ask Todd Frazier if he wouldn't rather play for another team, and Todd Frazier was kind enough to respond in a way that was not incredibly un-wise.
"Maybe for one year," Frazier told NJ Advance Media Wednesday at Citizens Bank Park when asked about possibly donning a Mets uniform at some point, maybe even as soon as next month's trade deadline. "Before I retire, it would be cool to be in New York. But, right now I'd like to be here. I'd like to be in Cincinnati my whole life. That would be pretty nice. I like it out there."
Meanwhile, Marlon Byrd was less diplomatic - stating that the home-plate collision rule is not fair to the runner, based on a plate at the plate on Friday. According to Byrd, before the new rule, Byrd would have just barreled into him and knocked him on his back. Apparently, if he had done that, the home plate umpire still would have called him safe? Marlon Byrd was called safe, and wasn't injured in that collision, but I guess it's could've happened.
According to Bryan Price on Tuesday, the Reds will probably stick with their 8-man bullpen. This is probably a smart move with three rookie pitchers in the rotation. Price also said he doesn't feel hampered by a 4-man bench - which will be a little different forward as Byrd goes on the DL and Ivan DeJesus joins the major league team. It helps that there's not really anyone with the organization who I think really think would be more helpful on our bench than the 8th bullpen arm. Of course, that goes both ways: how helpful is a bigger bullpen, when it's a terrible bullpen?
New data is allowing people to look at contact quality for pitchers, and it paints Johnny Cueto in a positive light. At this point, I've just started to think of advanced pitching metrics as a field of study dedicated to the question of why Johnny Cueto is better than his FIP. Here is what Tony Blengino at fangraphs had to say:
Johnny Cueto – Like Fister, Cueto rode a low liner rate (10th percentile) to contact-management success in 2014. Unlike him, however, there are many other building blocks in place to support long-term success in this area. Cueto has maintained at least that low a liner rate in two of the last three seasons, so it just might be a real skill. He also manages the authority of all types of contact extremely well: his average grounder authority allowed was over two, and his average fly-ball and liner authority allowed was over a full standard deviation(s) below NL average. Though his liner rate is up thus far in 2015, his overall contact-management ability is very real, and should support a healthy free agent payday this fall.
Most people have probably seen this, but the Scripps Center in Cincinnati is doing Mr. Redlegs Cosplay. Unfortunately, the building has an arc of dark windows where the eyes would be, so it sort of looks like Mr. Redlegs, but also kind of like Geordi La Forge.
The Reds are trying to break a Guinness World Record, by setting up the largest game of catch, which will be on July 9. Sign up your children ages 8-18! Because Reasons! I've found a couple similar events, but nothing that says what the actual current record is.