Sometimes it seems that every ball a player hits is well-struck, but right at somebody.  At other times, a player will be getting hits on seeing-eye ground balls, bloops over the infield, and swinging bunts that travel only a few feet.  We often hear, at these times, that a player's luck "evens out" over the course of a season.  But this is more an article of faith than a matter of fact.  In fact, I think it is fairly easy to prove that good hitters have more bad luck than poor hitters, while poor hitters have more good luck than good hitters.

For purposes of illustration, let's say that every ball that is hit is either a "well-hit ball" or a "poorly-hit ball".  (In actual practice, the division may not be so clear-cut.)  Let's also say that the percentage of well-hit balls that are turned into outs ("unlucky outs") is equal to the percentage of poorly-hit balls that sneak through or drop in for hits ("lucky hits").  Let's say that a league-average hitter has fifty per cent well-hit balls and fifty per cent poorly-hit balls.  This league-average hitter should, mathematically, have just as many lucky hits as unlucky outs, and his luck should indeed even out over the course of the season.  (Or over whatever period constitutes a sufficient sample size.)

But what about the hitters who are better than, or worse than, league average?  Better hitters will have a higher percentage of well-hit balls, and a correspondingly lower percentage of poorly-hit balls, and thus, on average, will have more unlucky outs than lucky hits.  Poorer hitters will have a higher percentage of poorly-hit balls, and a correspondingly lower percentage of well-hit balls, and thus, on average, will have more lucky hits than unlucky outs.  Thus good hitters have more bad luck than poor hitters, while poor hitters have more good luck than good hitters.

Q.E.D.

I've been reading Cap Anson's My Baseball Career. In it, he relates that "Harry Wright, while playing with the Cincinnatis against the Holt Club June 22d, 1867, at Newport, Ky., made seven home runs, the largest number ever scored by any individual player in a game..." Anson goes on to explain that "the greater number of these old-time games were not played upon enclosed grounds and that the batter in many cases had no fences to prevent him from lining them out..."

Wow, what a concept! The batter lines the ball between the outfielders and actually runs around the bases before the ball can be chased down, returned to the infield, and relayed home. I bet this is how the term "home run" came to be used, rather than "home jog" or "home trot". Theoretically, the dimensions of fair territory were infinite, extending to the horizon and beyond. Practically, of course, it might be limited by such boundaries as a road, a creek, or, in Anson's neighborhood, a "low picket fence". Even at this late date, many of us played on this sort of field when we were young, hitting or chasing down this kind of home run rather than the over-the-fence kind.

When "high board fences" were added, it was to keep the ball in, and non-paying customers out, rather than to provide sluggers with a target. For a time, they actually served this purpose. According to www.crosley-field.com, the original dimensions of Crosley Field (then called Redland Field) were 360' down each line, and 420' to dead center. Given the dead ball in use at the time (1912) it was probably not humanly possible to hit an over-the-fence home run in such a park. Due to sun field problems, the field was soon rotated slightly, making it 393' to right, 415' to center, and 348' to left, prompting The Sporting News to opine that "The only chance ... for a home run over the fence is for the ball to be hit to left field," and it was 1921, with the adoption of a new, livelier ball, before that happened.

I was surprised to discover that such "juiced" balls did not make their first appearance at the end of the dead-ball era.  Cap Anson relates a tale from his early days when his father played for an amateur team in Marshalltown, Iowa.  After a barnstorming professional team had beaten the locals by "only" 18 to 3, a rematch was hastily arranged. Anson then quotes his father as follows:

The rules of the game at that time made the playing of a "Ryan dead ball" compulsory, and this it was the province of the home club to furnish, and this was the sort of a ball that was played with the first day. To bat such a ball as this to any great distance was impossible and our fielders were placed well in for the second game, just as they had been in the first, but we soon discovered that the balls were going far beyond us, and on noting their positions when our turn to bat came we found their fielders placed much further out than on the day before. My first impression was that the great flights taken by the ball were due to the tremendous batting, but later on I became convinced that there was something wrong with the ball, and called for time to investigate the matter.

On questioning our unsophisticated management I discovered that the visitors had generously (?) offered to furnish the ball for the second game, as we had furnished the ball for the first, and had been allowed to do so. We later learned that they had skinned the liveliest kind of a "Bounding Rock" and re-covered it with a "Ryan Dead Ball" cover. This enabled them to get ahead at the start, but after we had learned of the deception we held them down so close that they won back but a very small share of the money that they had lost on the game of the day before, though they beat us by a score of 35 to 5.

In the dead ball era, enclosing the outfield actually served to decrease the number of homers. Balls that previously might have "rolled forever" and gone for home runs were turned into doubles or triples by outfielders who played carom-shots off the wall like Manny Ramirez used to play them off the Green Monster. It was, I am tempted to say, a case of "many being Manny". Being able to use the wall as an extra defender allowed outfielders to play more shallow, which meant they could take away some bloop hits that previously would have fallen in. Enclosing the field helped to depress scoring in the dead-ball era.

But there were a few home runs back then, and plenty of triples. It's just that every home run hit in Cincinnati was an inside-the-park job. Watching an actual home run, it seems to me, would be a lot more exciting than watching a home run trot. Triples can be pretty exciting, too, and when you think about it, triples should be more common than home runs -- the biggest hit should be the rarest hit. If you were designing a new game from scratch, you would make it so. During the dead-ball era, it was so. The 1919 World Champion Reds hit a grand total of 20 home runs, but they had over 80 triples in that 140-game season. Some years they had well over a hundred triples in a season.

The combination of Babe Ruth, the new lively ball, and the odd configuration of the Polo Grounds produced a number of over-the-fence home runs, which fans liked because they had rarely seen them before. The owners naturally wanted to give the fans more of what they seemed to like. So they built Yankee Stadium with a "short porch" in right, so the Babe could continue to hit a lot of home runs. Crosley Field, following suit, went from 348' in left down to 339' in 1926, and down to 328' in 1938. Center field went from 420' down to 395' in 1926, and down to 380' in 1938. Right field remained a "fur piece" until the addition of the "goatrun" in the 1940s shortened it to 342', which was still much longer than the 325' RF line at GABP today.

When you shorten the dimensions of the field, you get more home runs, but you also get a lot fewer triples, and you make the inside-the-park home run virtually extinct. (You need wide open spaces where the ball can bounce or roll around for a while.) You lose the excitement of an inside-the-parker, because you'll likely never see one, and you lose the excitement of the ball hit over the fence, because it becomes cheap and commonplace. You reduce the amount of ground that your outfielders have to cover, making it possible to play slow-moving, relatively immobile sluggers in the outfield rather than younger, speedier fielders.  And when you decide to go with younger, faster outfielders, relying on pitching, defense and "small ball", you reduce the chances of that plan succeeding, because you are still playing in a ballpark designed for aging sluggers -- who are now playing for the opposition.

Spring training stats don't mean much of anything, but if they mean anything at all you would think they would mean more at a team level than at an individual level, if only because of the increased sample size. It might be alarming, then, to notice that the Reds come out of spring training hitting .241/.301/.381, which is 29th out of 30 teams in all three categories (batting, on-base, and slugging averages). If this held up over the regular season, I would expect them to score less than four runs per game, which would be very bad news indeed.

The good news is that the thirty players the Reds have brought north, and from whom the 25-man roster will presumably be chosen, batted a combined .270/.327/.433, which is very respectable. The projected starting eight have hit a combined.278/.339/.419, which is also very respectable. If these two figures held up over the regular season, I would expect them to score close to five runs per game, which would be very good news indeed.

The reason for the discrepancy is that most of the guys who were dragging down the team averages are no longer with the team, notably the sub-Mendoza trio of Jones, Hopper and Keppinger. Conversely, guys like McDonald who have had unexpectedly good springs are still (unexpectedly) with the team. Another reason the current team's numbers are so high is that the pitchers have not gone to the plate very much, and when they have gone to the plate they have hit more like position players than pitchers. This is not likely to hold up, nor is it likely that McDonald will hit .300 in the regular season, unless it is at Louisville. And we must remember that some of these numbers were accumulated against minor-league pitchers.

So how many runs per game will the Reds score this year? Who knows; spring training stats don't mean much of anything.

Recently I was reading Steven Goldman's chapter "Can a Team Have Too Much Pitching?" in Baseball Between the Numbers:  Why Everything You Know About the Game Is Wrong, and came across the story of the 1932-33 New York Giants. Player-manager Bill Terry took over from John McGraw forty games into the '32 season, and limped to a 72-win season. Terry inherited a promising pitching staff with two established starters and two up-and-coming youngsters, but he realized that the effectiveness of his pitchers was hampered by a lack of defensive support. His Giants "were not only error-prone, ... they were also handicapped by players who lacked range." They had, among others, a shortstop with a broken knee, a corner outfielder playing out of position in center field, and a couple of defensively-challenged corner outfielders. All of these players were either benched or traded by Terry, and all of his moves involved giving up offense for defense. He kept a couple of good offensive players, however -- at first base and in right field. As a result, while the Giants scored 119 fewer runs in 1933, they gave up 191 fewer runs, for a net improvement of 72 runs! They won 91 games, the pennant, and the World Series.

Flash back to last season. The error-prone, range-challenged Reds had two established starters and two up-and-coming youngsters in the rotation. They also had not one but two shortstops with busted kneecaps, a corner outfielder (Jay Bruce) who for a time played out of position in center field, and two offensive-minded, defensively-challenged corner outfielders. Since then, Dunn and Griffey have been traded and Bruce has been moved to right field. So far, so good, if the intention was to emulate Terry's moves. Reds pitchers will almost certainly benefit from improved outfield defense. However, the Reds still appear to be counting on one of the two gimpy-kneed shortstops to fill that position, and they still have a major source of throwing errors at third base. As a result, major improvements in the won-loss record will probably have to wait for 2010, when Paul Janish presumably takes over at shortstop, and the Reds have either tamed Edwin Encarnacion's scatter-arm or are ready to replace him with a more reliable third baseman. At that point, if Joey Votto can hit like Bill Terry, and Jay Bruce like Mel Ott, the Reds will be sitting pretty.

Okay, so I screwed up the pitching stats (and consequently the pitching staff) when I selected my 100-Year Reds Team. I could not calculate a true "ABSO against" for the pitchers, due to a lack of the "slugging against" stat for NL pitchers prior to 1999, and of "on-base against" for NL pitchers prior to 1912, so I used WHIP in place of on-base against, and tried to invent something to substitute for "slugging against". WHIP works pretty well in place of OBA, but what I replaced "slugging against" with was not a very good stat.

Since hits and home runs allowed are known, but doubles and triples allowed are not, I tried to calculate a weighted hit rate by just adding home runs and hits together and dividing by innings pitched, on the assumption that a home run would be worth about twice as much as the average hit. The problem is not with the assumption, but with the fact that (H+HR) / AB doesn't turn out to be much different from H / AB, especially in years without a lot of home runs. So when you plug it into an ABSO-like formula, it is a lot like double-weighting batting average against, which is clearly wrong.

So what am I going to do to fix this? Rather than take an average of three different averages, a la ABSO, I decided to come up with a single all-purpose pitching stat which, unlike WHIP, takes into account that some hits are more valuable than others, and that walks are not as valuable (on average) as hits.

Previously, I had calculated (based on the linear weights used to calculate Tom Tango's weighted on-base average, or wOBA) that if a single is assigned a value of 1, then a double is worth about 1.40, a triple 1.78, a home run 2.21, and the lowly walk about 0.74. Ideally, if we knew the number of doubles and triples a pitcher had allowed, we could calculate a weighted WHIP as follows:

wtWHIP = ((BB x 0.74) + 1B + (2B x 1.40) + (3B x 1.78) + (HR x 2.21))  /  IP

The problem, as before, is that we don't know how many doubles and triples these pitchers allowed. We do know, however, how many doubles and triples were hit by the league's batters, and thus were allowed by the league's pitchers, so we can calculate how such hits were distributed on average. If we multiply singles, doubles, and triples by their respective values (1 for a single, 1.4 for a double, and 1.78 for a triple) and divide by the total number of non-homer hits, we find that the average value of such hits is about 1.1. The value of a walk is almost exactly two-thirds of 1.1, and the value of a home run (as I had previously and correctly assumed) is almost exactly twice this value -- and this is true whether we are talking about 2008, or 1958, or 1908, or National League history in total. Thus we can calculate a weighted WHIP as follows:

wtWHIP = (2/3 BB + H + HR) / IP

In keeping with such stats as ERA+, we can also calculate a Weighted WHIP Plus as follows:

wtWHIP+ = league wtWHIP / pitcher wtWHIP

Note that the lower the weighted WHIP, the better, while with weighted WHIP Plus, the higher the better. We express wtWHIP+ as a percentage, with numbers over 100 being better than league average, and numbers below 100 being worse than league average.

I calculated wtWHIP and wtWHIP+ for all Reds (or Redlegs) pitchers from 1890 through 2008, both single-season and Reds career-wise, and posted the top 25 in each of the four categories here. (If you don't see wtWHIP stats when you go to that page, you may need to hit F5 or click "refresh".) The rightmost column (Career wtWHIP+) is most important in my opinion. Based on this, I should have included Gary Nolan and Paul Derringer on my 100-year Reds team, and should have omitted Johnny Vander Meer and (reluctantly) Jim Maloney. I hope those who were touting Derringer and/or deprecating Vander Meer see this correction. If so, congratulations; I have decided you are right -- at least for the moment.

This is the time of year that fans speculate about which players are going to make the 25-man roster and which ones are going to start the season in the minors. When your current team looks like it will be lucky to reach the .500 mark, it is also the time of year to reflect on the glory days of the past, and construct an all-time team roster.

John Erardi recently posted his all-time Reds team. There are a number of things wrong with it, but the main two are that he has both Larkin and Concepcion in the starting lineup, with Concepcion playing out of position at third base. That's just silly. It's also silly that he couldn't bear to actually cut his roster down to 25 men, and so stopped at 27 with the lame excuse that "at least two players are always going to be on the disabled list."

I will actually limit my roster to 25 men, but I will exclude players of over one hundred years ago. As a result, you will not see such players as Noodles Hahn, Dummy Hoy, and Jake Beckley on this roster. They were great players, but the game was very different then. As a result, this is actually not an all-time team, but a 100-year team.

In the lists below, left-handed hitters are indicated by *, switch hitters by #. The number in parentheses is a rating that indicates how well the player hit or pitched compared to the average National League hitter or pitcher of that player's playing days with the Reds. This number is "absolute average plus" for hitters and "approximate absolute average against plus" for pitchers. Examples: Frank Robinson's 129 indicates that he hit 29% better than the National League average for batting, slugging and on-base combined, and Mario Soto's 114 indicates that he pitched approximately 14% better than league average pitchers, based on batting average against, WHIP (which approximates on-base against), and a third stat, Weighted Hit Ratio, which substitutes for slugging against.

Active Roster

1. Frank Robinson RF (129) - best slugger, best overall hitter
2. Joe Morgan * 2B (123) - best on-base guy, best overall player (incl. baserunning and defense)
3. George Foster LF (122) - decent left fielder who hits well for both power and average
4. Edd Roush * CF (121) - not only a great dead-ball hitter, but an excellent CF with a great arm
   
5. Eric Davis OF (120) - gives you speed, defense and a good right-handed bat off the bench
6. Ted Kluszewski * 1B (119) - good first baseman who hits well for both power and average
7. Pete Rose # IF-OF (118) - best hitter for average, and a very versatile defensive player
8. Tony Perez 1B (118) - great clutch hitter, will be a great pinch hitter or could platoon with Klu
9. Heinie Groh 3B (117) - best defensive 3B, and he was on-base when on-base wasn't cool
10. Vada Pinson * OF (117) - gives you speed, defense and a good left-handed bat off the bench
11. Ernie Lombardi C (116) - good all-around hitter, with a rifle arm behind the plate
12. Johnny Bench C (115) - good power hitter, and one of the all-time great defensive catchers
    
13. Mario Soto RHP (114) - had the Reds' best pitching career all-time, by my metrics
    
14. Barry Larkin SS (113) - good offensive player in a primarily defensive position
15. Tom Seaver RHP (112) - scientific and consistently terrific; it was all in the legs, and the mind
16. Ewell Blackwell RHP (112) - his sidearm whip action intimidated right-handed hitters
    
17. Dolf Luque RHP (111) - double-figure wins ten straight years, including 27-8 in 1923, (1.93 ERA)
    
18. Jose Rijo RHP (111) - the third (with Soto and Luque) of the Reds' three great Latin right-handers
    
19. Jim Maloney * RHP (111) - a hard-throwing strikeout pitcher who won 20+ twice for the Reds
    
20. Johnny Vander Meer # LHP (110) - walked a lot of batters, but didn't give up many hits
    
21. Don Gullett LHP (110) - an impressive but injury-shortened career; great winning percentage
    
22. Bucky Walters RHP (109) - won 20+ three times, won pitching Triple Crown and MVP in 1939
    
23. Red Lucas * RHP (108) - good pitcher, good hitter, good fielder, just a good ballplayer
    
24. Eppa Rixey LHP (106) - needed another lefty, and this guy's a Hall of Famer
    
25. Dave Concepcion IF (99) - needed to back up Larkin, and as a utility infielder
    

Dave Concepcion's 99 makes him the only position player on the team to be below league average offensively, and shows why Erardi making him the third baseman is so ridiculous: He simply does not hit well enough to play third. Heck, one of the pitchers (Red Lucas) is a better hitter, at 102. If Concepcion's going to be in the lineup every day, it better be because you need him to play shortstop. He is good enough defensively, however, to earn a roster spot in a backup/utility role.

Notice that both extra outfielders (Davis and Pinson) are able to play center field, which is what extra outfielders need to be able to do.

Coaching Staff

1. Manager: Sparky Anderson - Captain Hook should be able to get enough work for all the pitchers
2. Bench Coach: Bill McKechnie - great baseball mind and a calming influence
   
3. Pitching Coach: Christy Mathewson - has the credibility to work w/ this staff, especially w/ Seaver
   
4. Hitting Coach: Rogers Hornsby - didn't succeed as Reds manager, but certainly knew how to hit
   
5. First Base Coach: Pat Moran - the first to win a World Series, so he gets to coach first
6. Third Base Coach: Lou Piniella - so he can be aggressive, and close to the base he likes to throw
7. Bullpen Coach: Fred Hutchinson - a good former pitcher that players respected as a manager
8. Bullpen Catcher: Jimmie Wilson - if Lombardi goes down, we can always activate him again

Opening Day Lineup

1. Groh, 3B
2. Larkin, SS
3. Morgan, 2B *
4. Robinson, RF
5. Kluszewski, 1B *
6. Foster, LF
7. Roush, CF *
8. Bench, C
9. Walters, P

Why not Rose at third, leading off? Because, on this team, Rose is more valuable as a super sub than as a third baseman. Rose played only about one-fourth of his Reds games at third, while Groh is almost exclusively a third baseman, and will be better than Rose defensively, especially on modern (better) fields with modern (better) gloves. Groh is also slightly better (normalized to the time he played) at getting on base, which is the main job of the leadoff hitter. Rose on the bench sets up almost limitless pinch-hitting and double-switch opportunities, since in addition to third he plays first, second, left and right. Therefore, like John Erardi, I did not select Pete Rose as my regular third baseman either, though I'm sure he'll get a large number of starts there, as well as at his other positions.

Pitching Rotation

1. Walters
2. Seaver
3. Maloney
4. Vander Meer
   

Early in the season, we'll only need a four-man rotation, so we'll go with this until we need a fifth starter. Besides, most of these guys are used to a four-man rotation. The rest of the pitchers will go to the bullpen for now. You may have noticed that I did not include any relief specialists on the team. I decided on a minimum of 700 innings pitched as a Red to qualify, and the relievers who qualify (Tom Hume, Pedro Borbon, Clay Carroll, Danny Graves, Ted Power) simply weren't good enough to make the team. There is plenty of relief experience on this team, however. One in three of Don Gullett's appearances as a Red was as a reliever. One in four of Ewell Blackwell's appearances was in relief, and he worked one season (1949) primarily as a reliever. (These two could make a nice lefty-righty "Nasty Boy" combo a la Myers and Dibble.) Rijo and Soto also had one in four appearances as relievers, while Lucas, Luque and Rixey were one in five. Red Lucas is the ideal long reliever, since he is always around the plate and is a good enough hitter that you don't have to pinch hit for him even when you are behind.

Since I live closer to Louisville than to Cincinnati, I am thrilled that the Reds' AAA affiliate will feature such great players as pitcher Gary Nolan, catcher Bubbles Hargrave, first baseman Frank McCormick, second baseman Johnny Temple -- oh, wait!

Darn it, for a moment I forgot this was just a fantasy...

When the Reds traded Adam Dunn last year, some fans may have gotten the idea that the Reds' new management didn't like defensively-challenged, strikeout-prone, low-average, poor-with-RISP outfielders, but check out the following career numbers, with percentages based on plate appearances:

Player	B.A.	w/RISP	K%	BB%	HR%
Adam Dunn	.247	.225	26%	17%	5.9%
Jonny Gomes	.235	.228	28%	10%	4.5%
Laynce Nix	.235	.227	26%	5%	3.1%

Gomes has a reputation of being poor defensively, too.  So it appears that to Reds management, defensively-challenged, strikeout-prone, low-average, poor-with-RISP outfielders are fine as long as they are cheap, don't walk too much and don't hit too many home runs.

First came OPS+, which seemed like a pretty good idea even if OPS wasn't much to start with. But it occurred to me that any rate stat could receive the "plus" treatment, assuming you had a league average to compare it to. So I calculated Batting Average Plus (BA+), Slugging Plus (SLG+), On-base Plus (OBP+) and Absolute Average Plus (ABSO+) for all Reds careers and single seasons since 1890, when the current Reds franchise joined the National League.

For a single season, to calculate what I call BA+, you simply divide the player's batting average by the league batting average for that season, then multiply by 100 to express the number as a percentage.  A player with, say, a BA+ of 120 has a batting average 20% higher than the league average, so the stat is very easy to interpret. The same goes for SLG+, OBP+, and ABSO+.  (By the way, ABSO is the Average of Batting, Slugging, and On-base averages.)

For careers, the procedure is somewhat more complicated.  To weight each season or partial season appropriately, I decided to run two accumulators, one for the player's average for each season multiplied by his plate appearances for that season, and one for the league average multiplied by that same number.  Once I have accumulated all the (Reds) seasons for the player's career, I simply divide the player accumulator by the league accumulator and multiply by 100.

I believe that my Career BA+, SLG+, OBP+, and ABSO+ stats will correspond very well to most people's idea of the Reds' all-time best traditional hitter (BA+), best slugger (SLG+), best on-base guy (OBP+), and best overall hitter (ABSO+).  Check it out at www.RedlegStats.com and let me know what you think. The "raw" stats are there too, if you don't care for the "plus" idea. It can be interesting to compare the two.

Dusty don't allow no base-clogging round here
Dusty don't allow no base-clogging round here
We don't care what Dusty don't allow
Gonna clog them bases anyhow
Dusty don't allow no base-clogging round here

--Southern Ohio folk song, circa 2008

Will the Reds change their tune in 2009? Originally I thought the whole base-clogging thing was overblown, but consider that every major-league position player the Reds have acquired since Dusty Baker became Reds manager has had a below-league-average OBP, both career-wise and over their three most-recent major-league seasons.

Player	Career OBP	Last 3 Seasons
Willy Taveras	.331	.333
Jerry Hairston Jr.	.330	.315
Ramon Hernandez	.326	.328
Jolbert Cabrera	.306	.320
Andy Phillips	.294	.304
Paul Bako	.305	.284
Corey Patterson	.280	.289

The bottom four on this totem pole are now gone, but it is worth noting that they represent the type of player Baker apparently wants on his team.  I know that Baker is not the GM, but he can certainly influence trades and signings.  He also makes out the lineup and batting order, and it is likely that his first two batters this year will have subpar OBPs.  League average for non-pitchers is .340-something, and Taveras and Hairston are both well below that line.  (Hairston had a good OBP last year, but even with that factored in, he is at only .315 for the past three years.)

Now consider some of the players with above-average OBP's who have departed during Baker's tenure:

Player	Career OBP	Last 3 Seasons
Adam Dunn	.381	.379
Ken Griffey Jr.	.373	.350
Scott Hatteberg	.361	.384
Ryan Freel	.357	.343

In addition, consider that Norris Hopper (.367), while he is still officially a Red, was non-tendered and re-signed in such a way to make it less expensive to stockpile him at Triple-A. Also consider that David Ross, while his career and three-year numbers were poor,  was in the midst of his best OBP season ever, with a .381, when he was DFA'd. The departure of high-OBP players, coupled with the arrival of low-OBP players, makes it likely that the team OBP will suffer.

Why is team OBP important? The following table has every Reds season since 1980 inclusive, sorted from highest to lowest OBP. Note that (1) every year the Reds team OBP was .339 or higher, they scored more than five runs per game, (2) every year their team OBP was .315 or lower, they scored less than four runs per game, and (3) every year their OBP was greater than .315 but less than .339, they scored between four and five runs per game. So a few points of OBP can make a big difference in runs scored, which are reputed to have an effect on wins and losses.

Year	OBP	G	R	R/G
1994	.349	115	609	5.30
2000	.343	163	825	5.06
1995	.340	144	747	5.19
1999	.339	163	865	5.31
2005	.339	163	820	5.03
1998	.336	162	750	4.63
2006	.336	162	749	4.62
1981	.336	108	464	4.30
2007	.335	162	783	4.83
2004	.331	162	750	4.63
1996	.330	162	778	4.80
2002	.330	162	709	4.38
1992	.329	162	660	4.07
1987	.328	162	783	4.83
1980	.327	163	707	4.34
1985	.326	162	677	4.18
1986	.325	162	732	4.52
2001	.324	162	735	4.54
1993	.324	162	722	4.46
1990	.322	162	693	4.28
2008	.321	162	704	4.35
2003	.318	162	694	4.28
1991	.318	162	689	4.25
1997	.317	162	651	4.02
1984	.315	162	627	3.87
1983	.314	162	623	3.85
1982	.310	162	545	3.36
1989	.308	162	632	3.90
1988	.307	161	641	3.98

I only went back to 1980 in the table, but the Reds' all-time best two years OBP-wise were 1976 (.357) and 1975 (.352). I seem to recall that those were a couple of pretty good years for the Reds.

John Fay quotes new Reds center fielder Willy Taveras as saying, "I'm happy to play for Dusty (Baker). It's an opportunity to play every day, no matter what happened the day before."

Amusing, but probably true. Taveras must have noticed Baker's dedication to keeping Corey Patterson in the lineup last year, come hell or high water.  Patterson's high-water mark last year was barely over the Mendoza line, yet he logged well over half the available centerfield innings, and almost three times as many as any other Reds center fielder.

If Baker pencils Taveras in every day in center field and the leadoff spot, it will apparently be with Walt Jocketty's blessing. Mark Sheldon quotes Jocketty as saying, "With Bruce and Taveras, we have two of our outfield spots filled" and "we have a center fielder that can play good defense and lead off."

Well, maybe. But Taveras' OBP, while better than Patterson's, is far from that of the ideal leadoff man, and it is doubtful that Taveras' defense will be an upgrade over Patterson's, considering that from 2006-2008, Patterson had the third-best plus/minus rating of all major-league centerfielders, while Taveras did not make the top ten. Taveras' best showing was fifth place in 2006, when Patterson was #1.

Taveras comes in with the reputation of being one of the best bunters in the majors, but then so did Patterson. The year before he came to the Reds, Patterson was successful in 13 out of 14 sacrifice attempts, and was 12 for 24 in bunting for base hits.  For some reason, Patterson rarely demonstrated this ability when playing for the Reds.

Perhaps it was the lure of the easy GABP home run that discouraged Patterson from bunting. At least Taveras is not likely to go down this same path, since he has roughly the same power as Norris Hopper.  (In fact, Hopper's career slugging average is 34 points higher than Taveras', but this is directly attributable to the fact that Hopper's career batting average is 33 points higher.)

Taveras probably won't have to worry about Hopper pushing him, though, since the Reds non-tendered Hopper and then immediately re-signed him in such a way that they can more cheaply stockpile him at Triple-A. Gone, too, are Patterson, Ryan Freel and, for the moment at least, Jerry Hairston Jr., so alternatives to Taveras in center are extremely limited. He is, as he said, likely to play every day, regardless of what happened the day before.

Oddly enough, Taveras' career line of .283/.331/.337 yields exactly the same absolute average (.317) as Patterson's .253/.291/.407. I am not saying Taveras is doomed to fail like Patterson, however. He should be fun to watch, with all his bunts for base hits and stolen bases. I am looking forward to it, actually. His stolen bases and stolen-base percentage make up for his lack of power, to some extent, except that stolen bases do not, as a rule, advance other runners, and infield hits do not, as a rule, score runners from second.

While driving in runs is secondary for a leadoff hitter, it can still be important.  For all Patterson's struggles last year, he had some big home runs and RBI's from time to time.  We are not likely to get many of those from Taveras. In his career, with a runner on second only, Taveras has had 34 hits but has driven in the runner only 10 times. And his batting average with RISP is only .247 to begin with. He'd better be a very good table-setter, because he does not clean the table very often.