Feel free to add your own that you may have read or heard about. These are simply stats that I found hard to believe while perusing baseball-reference.com. No agenda here. Not picking on any particular player. Some are good, some are bad and some are just hard to believe.
1) Sean Marshall has not thrown a double play ball so far in 2012. He has had 40 opportunities to do so. The fact that he throws a higher-than normal about of ground balls makes this fact stand out even more. He has a higher go/fo ratio than any other pitcher on the staff with the exception of Jonathan (Small sample size) Broxton. Sam LeCure has thrown the highest percentage of double play balls at 15%. The staff, as a whole, has a 10% double play percentage, which is league average.
2) If you equate BABIP to luck then Alfredo Simon (.349) and Sean Marshall (.348) are the unluckiest Reds' hurlers. The league average is .299. Lady Luck has been riding on the shoulders of Chapman (.252), Ondrusek (.257) and Arredondo (.257).
3)Johnny Cueto and BABIP. At the end of last year all we heard was Cueto's ERA was due to having such a low BABIP. And that we should expect that BABIP to normalize and the ERA to go up accordingly. Wrong. In 2011, Johnny had an unusually low BABIP of .254. His ERA was 2.31. This year his BABIP rose back up to his career levels. His BABIP is .293 but his ERA stayed low at 2.48. I remember reading that it was going to be in 3.50 or so range. That certainly did not happen.
4) Reds' hitters have a lot of pop in their bats (and play in a ballpark conducive to throwing up good offensive numbers).
The league average for percentage of XBH is 7.6%. The Reds team average is a healthy 8.7%. Joey Votto - Mr. Double - leads the way at a whopping 13.5%. Todd Frazier and Ryan Ludwick are tied for second at 12.4%. Jay Bruce is next at 11.8%. The Reds only have two (at least semi-regular players) that are below league average. Ryan Hanigan (4.6%) and Drew Stubbs (6.2%).
5) Cutting down on strikeouts can and does happen. Proof positive is Brandon Phillips. From 2002-2008 his lowest strikeout percentage in any give season was 15.0. Cumulatively, he struck out 16.2% of the time in that period. In 2009 he became a different hitter. Since 2009 his highest K% in any given season is 12.6%. And, as a whole, he has struck out just 12.0% during that period. That works out to him striking out just a little over 25% fewer times in that stretch. How did that affect his hitting? From 2002-2008 his OPS was .733. From 2009-2012 it has risen to .784. There were probably other factors, but striking out 25% fewer times had to have helped.
6)Range factors for starting pitchers. There was quite a discrepancy here that I thought telling. The first number is the range factor and the number in parentheses is the gb/fb percentage. You can draw your own conclusions but the numbers seem to tell a story.
Cueto-2.58 (.96)
Leake-2.55 (.94)
Arroyo-2.04 (.69)
Latos-1.81 (.82)
Bailey-1.30 (.78)
Originally Posted by Ironman92
