Early thoughts about the 2024 Redlegs...
Leave Elly alone!!!
Some musings as I relax in the backyard, listening to the Redlegs and the Brew Crew wait out a rain delay…
In this week’s column over at the Mothership, I made a pretty strained comparison between Spencer Steer and Reds legend Tony Perez. The point, in brief, is that Perez was really good — he’s a Hall of Famer, you know — but was never considered the best player on any team he played for. Steer, similarly, is overshadowed by other talented and exciting players, but he just keeps producing.
Anyway, I won’t repeat myself here; you can go read it if you like.* But as I was writing the column, I got curious about how many of Perez’s teammates over the years had won a Most Valuable Player award. Turns out the number is 13.** I mused on twitter/X that I’d be surprised if any player had played with more.
*Please read it. I’m desperate for your clicks!
**My first quick glance gave me 12; I forgot Dennis Eckersley had won an MVP.
That led to a pretty entertaining evening of diving down this particular baseball rabbit hole. Others chimed in:
Seth Shaner first thought about Kenny Lofton, but turns out he only played with 12 MVPs.
Steve Mancuso came up with Rickey Henderson, who played with 12 — but also won an MVP himself, so maybe 13? (I’m not going to weigh in on the question of whether Rickey played with himself.)
Chris Garber finally topped me: Don Baylor, who played with 14 MVPs.
Then Mo Egger dazzled the crowd by coming up with a player who had played with 16 MVPs! And it was reliever Doug Bair! Who knew???
Finally, Petey Hendrix dropped the mic. Jamie Moyer, who played with 18 MVPs. Crazy.
Dumb stuff like this is why baseball will always be the best.
How is it possible that MLB still hasn’t fixed the problems with its blackout rules? It’s astounding to me that these complaints get louder and louder each year, yet MLB refuses to budge. I can’t believe the benefits of the blackouts to the corporate bottom line outweigh making it so difficult for fans to actually watch and enjoy the product they’re trying to sell.
I remember a few years ago the Reds were playing in Baltimore. I happened to be in far southwest Virginia at the time and tried to turn on the game. Blacked out. It would have taken me eight hours to drive to Oriole Park at Camden Yards for the game. The broadcast was available on no local cable system. I had literally paid United States legal tender for access to MLB.tv. Yet I was denied.
Someone explain how this makes sense in the age of streaming?
Why can’t everyone just be patient with Elly De La Cruz? Why are so many fans seemingly so eager to call him a bust?
The kid is 22 years old, for crying out loud. Yes, his defense is shaky. So what? Barry Larkin made 19 errors in his first season in the bigs, then followed that up with 29 errors in his second season. He made 58 errors in his first 349 games. And yet Larkin went on to win three Gold Gloves, and deserved to win at least a couple more.
Yes, Elly is striking out a lot. Give him time to adjust to big league pitching, please and thank you. He has literally played in 109 MLB games. He’s accumulated only 472 plate appearances, less than a full season. The game is hard. He’ll get better.
Oh, and by the way, he’s hitting .293/.356/.585 with an OPS+ of 151. Monday night, when he hit a 450-foot home run, and followed that up with an inside-the-park homer the same night — that was simply electric. On any given night, he is capable of doing something that makes your jaw drop.
Try enjoying the things he does well and having patience when the kid makes mistakes.
Biggest question I’m wrestling with today. Who is the most exciting Reds player of my lifetime? Is it Elly? Or Eric Davis? Or perhaps Logan Ondrusek?
After this four-game set against Milwaukee, the Reds play nine straight against American League competition. Six on the road in Chicago and Seattle, then back home to face the Angels.
Hot take: it’s time to do away with interleague play. What’s even the point?
Recently, Nate Silver proposed a realignment of Major League Baseball that would add two teams (Montreal and Nashville), and then split the teams into eight divisions of four teams each. I think it’s simply perfect. The Reds would be in the National League with the Braves, Pirates, and the Nashville expansion team (he calls them the Nashville Stars). Here’s Nate’s explanation:
Here’s where I’m going to bring out the trolls — PiTtSbUrGh Is NoT tHe SoUtH. And maybe Cincinnati isn’t either. But this is a geographically coherent division, as you can see from the map, and the Pirates have historic rivalries against both the Reds and the Braves. The Nashville franchise is named for the former Negro League team, plus “Stars” is a great name for the city that was the birthplace of the country’s biggest pop star.
Let’s do this, and eliminate interleague play at the same time. It would make the game far more interesting.
This week at Cincinnati Magazine: Spencer Steer is the Reds MVP so far
From the time he made his big league debut in 1964 until his retirement in 1986, there was never a single season when Tony Perez was the best player on his team. Throughout a career with four franchises, including 16 seasons in Cincinnati, he was always overshadowed.
It’s really kind of remarkable. Perez played with no fewer than 13 players who won a Most Valuable Player award: Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, George Foster, Andre Dawson, Carl Yastrzemski, Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Dennis Eckersley, Mike Schmidt, Dave Parker, and Barry Larkin. In his best season (1970), Perez hit .317/.401/.589 with 40 home runs and 129 runs batted in and finished third in MVP balloting. He was, of course, overshadowed that particular season by Reds catcher Bench, who won the first of his two MVP trophies.
The flip side of the coin is this: If you polled Perez’s teammates over the years, I’d bet you’d discover that he was considered by his peers to be the most important player on most of those teams. Read the rest of this week’s Reds column over at Cincinnati Magazine.
What’s Chad Watching?
Not much to say here. Priscilla is Sofia Coppola’s latest, and it’s just not particularly good. I’d say it’s worth watching, but I was disappointed.
The others were some film noirs that I had never seen, so I downloaded for a couple of train trips. All were enjoyable.
Here in East Central Illinois, MLB blacks out the Cubs, White Sox, and Cardinals. That is a pretty fair chunk of the schedule that is off limits!
I agree that it's obviously way too early to write off Elly de la Cruz, but do you think he is too big to be a major league shortstop? With his arm and speed, I wonder if he would be better off in CF or RF.