Jay Bruce has now spent about a full season in the Major Leagues as he has accumulated 649 plate appearances coming into Tuesdays game. I really have only focused on three aspects of his offensive game, of which I feel are the key to all players success in the Major Leagues.

I looked month by month at the walk rate (BB/PA), strike out rate (K/PA) and isolated power (measures XBH by subtracting AVG from SLG). Each one stat has its own importance, but lets take a look at what the charts look like.

Lets start by looking at his walk rate first. He started off with good patience over his first week or so in 2008 but saw it slide down over the next month. Since then it has slowly been going in the right direction. His K rate has steadily been going down since he got into the Major Leagues a year ago. Finally, we can see that his power has really gone up, to elite levels in a short period of time.

So, despite having lackluster slash stats this year (AVG/OBP/SLG) this year (note: his .221 BABIP this year is 3rd worst in baseball; league average is .300, he has nowhere to go but up), Jay has been making strong progress in what he does at the plate since day 1. He is walking more, striking out less and hitting for more and more power every day.

One of the key things the Reds wanted to change from previous teams is to hone in on good defense. Willy Taveras, Jay Bruce, Chris Dickerson, Alex Gonzalez and Ramon Hernandez are all guys who were not on the team last April and for the most part, last season (Gonzo was, but he wasn’t playing). Thats a big change on the defensive side of things and to be fair, the Reds were not very good defenders last year as they were among the bottom of the league in defensive efficiency ratio (the rate in which balls in play – non HR’s – were turned into outs).

This year the Reds have seen some defensive issues come about with errors from time to time, but if you are reading this you are more than likely of the thinking that errors don’t tell you how good or bad a defense actually is. But I thought it would be a good time to take a look at how both the individuals and the team have performed to this point.

The Reds as a team are currently sporting a defensive efficiency ratio of .714, meaning they are turning balls in play into outs at a 71.4% rate, which ranks 4th best in all of baseball. Now I would like to stress that we are working with a small sample size here and things can change quickly, but so far things are looking good on the team scale.

As far as the individual scale goes, I have always been a fan of the system that Justin developed and I have used it in the past as well. Its pretty simple, but more often than not, it jives pretty well with scouting reports and other defensive systems. All data is gathered from TheHardballTimes.com. Again, lets really stress small sample size here, as for individual players you typically want more than one seasons worth of data and we are working with one month worth of data here.

First Base – Joey Votto

Votto currently ranks 17th out 0f 28 qualified first baseman, less than 1 play below average. The thing here is that Votto is working with less than 30 plays like most other first baseman, so the sample is extemely small.

Second Base – Brandon Phillips

Phillips ranks 2nd out of the qualified second baseman at +5 plays on the season, trailing just Howie Kendrick. Small sample of course, but Phillips is widely acknowledged as one of the best glove men in baseball.

Shortstop – Alex Gonzalez

Gonzalez currently ranks 18th out of 27 qualified shortstops with -1.3 plays. There have been moments where Gonzalez has looked quite good and other times he has looked like Jeff Keppinger. My eyes tell me that he isn’t a positive defender anymore though.

Third Base – Edwin Encarnacion

Encarnacion is 22nd out of 27 qualified third baseman. I don’t think I need to say much here, nothing has changed with him in years.

Left Field – Chris Dickerson/Jerry Hairston

The combo of Dickerson and Hairston currently rank 5th in baseball at +3.25 plays in left field. That certainly is a step up over last season.

Center Field – Willy Taveras

Willy Taveras is currently 22nd out of 28 qualified center fielders at -3.2 plays. Its pretty early though, as Nate McLouth is a positive defender right now after being the worst in baseball last year. Willy has looked fine to me.

Right Field – Jay Bruce

Bruce ranks out at -2.6 plays this season early on. My eyes don’t see that one, but we will see. Jay, like Joey Votto, is working with such a small number of plays right now (32) that one play made or not made can really make a big swing in this.

Overall

The defense certainly looks improved at this point in the season and the only two positions I am worried about are 3B and SS. It will be interesting to see how Adam Rosales does over there with Edwin on the disabled list.

Micah Owings made his pitching debut for the Reds last night against the Brewers. Here is what it looked like:

One thing to note right away is that Owings has a very straight fastball and his change up isn’t moving much more. That usually isn’t a very good thing. Its worth noting that Owings was throwing a ‘cut fastball’ , which is all of the ones that are barely moving, and a 4 seam fastball that makes up most of the ones with 5 or more inches of movement. Here is how his velocity looked:

Owings topped out at 88.7 MPH last night and worked for the most part in the 86-88 MPH range. Given the lack of movement his fastball gets and the mid to upper 80’s velocity, I am a little worried about what may happen moving forward if one or both don’t improve. Here is the pitch selection:

Owings worked off of his fastball for the most part, throwing a cutter, 4 and 2 seam fastball. One other things that must improve is his ability to throw all of his pitches for strikes more often. Last night, it didn’t look all that good.

As you can see, Owings really struggled to throw his pitches for strikes all night and it didn’t really matter what he was going to throw, the odds weren’t good that it was going to find the strikezone. Check out the pitch location’s for the different pitches:

His fastball was in the upper part of the zone for the most part on the night, while his off speed pitches were down in the zone. Here is what the results looked like on those pitches:

The end results looked fine in the box score, but by looking through all of this data, I have some concerns going forward with Owings.

Through the first week of the season Edwin Encarnacion is second in the NL in walks behind some guy named Adam Dunn. Encarnacion’s 8 walks and 4 strikeouts are potentially a sign of things to come for the young right hander heading into his ‘prime’ years at the plate. The old theory goes, the more pitches you see, the more likely it is that you see a mistake pitch and one that you can do some serious damage on. While Edwin is hit 4 for 16 at this point in the season, he is getting on base over 50% of the time he steps to the plate at this point in the season due to his walks. I thought I would just go ahead and make a quick post showing the pitches Edwin has swung at versus the pitches he has looked at so far this year (minus opening day which had tons of missing data).

Really, there are only 5 swings that are more than 2 inches outside of the zone that Edwin has swung at this season. If he can keep up this kind of selectivity we may see the culmination of the past two seasons for Edwin Encarnation where he hit .289 in 2007 and then hit 26 HR’s in 2008. If he can put those two things together in one season it will go a long way toward helping this Reds offense have another run producer to go along with Joey Votto.

• IP -9
• H – 3
• ER – 0
• BB – 0
• K – 9

Thats the line that Aaron Harang put up on Easter Sunday as the Reds beat the Pirates 2-0. I figured this would be the perfect time to break down his game.

First lets look at his selection of pitches.

Harang mixed up his pitches very well. These pitch labels are using the MLB pitch types, so they might not be 100% accurate, but they are pretty close. Either way, there was a good mixture of pitches. Lets look at how hard he was throwing each pitch.

Harangs fastball wasn’t going to blow anyone away as it averaged just over 88 MPH and topped out at 91.6 MPH. His change up wasn’t much slower, averaging 85 MPH. This next chart is the key to why Harang was able to be so dominant on Sunday.

In total Harang was able to throw strikes 75% of the time and he was also able to throw every pitch for strikes at a high rate. The hitters couldn’t sit on any pitch and Harang was able to keep them guessing wrong. Here is what he looked like to all of the batters.

Volquez struggled and didn’t make it through the 5th inning before leaving in favor of a reliever. Lets take a look at his pitch selection first.

Like usual its fastball and change up with a little extra thrown in, but really relying on those two pitches almost 90% of the time. Thats not really out of the ordinary with what he has done in the past.

Here is what the velocity looked like with the different pitches.

The fastball speed looks fine as he averaged 94 MPH and topped out at 96 MPH several times. His change up and slider were just about the same in terms of speed, while his curveball was a little bit slower than those two. Nothing really out of whack here though.

So lets take a look at the pitches vs the strikezone for Volquez.

Simple to see by looking at the chart… Volquez just couldn’t find the strikezone Wednesday. One thing to note, he only had 8 swings and misses on the day where he threw over 105 pitches. Volquez has always been a ‘wild but effective’ kind of guy. He needs to be less wild though, because its not always conducive to being effective.