Things like the win-loss record and place in the standings do not tell the story of what it’s been like to follow the Cincinnati Reds the last couple weeks. This team always has its ups and downs. When Joey Votto starts slumping, it seems like everyone follows. When Shin-Soo Choo can’t get to one ball in center, it seems like he can’t get to any of them. When it rains it pours.

But that stuff is easy to shrug off as your own expectation bias (anyone else been watching Brain Games lately?), whereas the performance of the bullpen is a different story. Even the success the team has enjoyed so far can’t even drown out the crapitude we’ve been treated to lately.

Ten guys have pitched in relief for the Reds this season. Here’s some information about them.

Reliever	ERA	IP	Earned Runs	Walks	Ks	Opponents’ batting average	WHIP
Chapman, A	2.25	28	7	12	48	0.18	1.07
LeCure, S	2.49	25.1	7	10	27	0.189	1.07
Marshall, S	2.57	7	2	2	7	0.16	0.86
Simon, A	3.09	32	11	8	26	0.236	1.16
Broxton, J	4.1	26.1	12	10	19	0.227	1.22
Hoover, J	5.4	26.2	16	13	27	0.24	1.43
Ondrusek, L	5.64	22.1	14	8	18	0.247	1.3
Parra, M	8.44	10.2	10	4	16	0.418	2.53
Freeman, J	18	1	2	0	0	0.4	2
Partch, C	27	0.1	1	0	0	0.5	3

Over the weekend the Reds tried to shake things up a little by sending down Logan Ondrusek and bringing up Curtis Partch. Partch has pitched 0.1 innings and only allowed 1 earned run…to the guy who hit the grand slam full of J.J. Hoover’s inherited runners last night. Alas, the shake up so far has only resulted in making Ondrusek’s the fourth-worst ERA in relief for the Reds rather than the third-worst.

Of course, Partch is the victim of a very small sample size. (And Hoover is a victim of Partch.) Same could be said of the guy above him in the list, Justin Freeman, who isn’t even with the team anymore. The sample size is not as much of a factor for Manny Parra, though. In his case I’m going to have to go with poor management. I mean, lefties hit .235 against him while righties are hitting .500. This guy shouldn’t have 10.2 innings’ worth of outs in only 12 games; it ought to take 25 games for him to get to 10.2 innings. Dude needs to face one batter and take a bow.

Simplistically, if you say that a reliever needs have <3.5 ERA to be good, we’ve only got 4 of those guys. But even among those:

• Aroldis Chapman is sort of a special case, seeing as he’s the closer and all.
• Sam LeCure has been a total savior for some games, but has given up 2 earned runs in 2 of his last 3 starts and has a 12.00 ERA for the month of June. That’s an unsettling trend.
• Sean Marshall is injured and hasn’t pitched since May.
• Alfredo Simon actually looks pretty good except for a disaster of an outing against Colorado last week. It’s too soon, I think, to say whether that was a fluke.

So, what’s the moral of this story? I haven’t been able to pin down a single thing that’s wrong with everyone: injuries, tiredness, poor management, lack of experience, lack of talent…it seems like it’s a little of everything. I guess even in the bullpen, when it rains it pours.

Yesterday, the 2013 edition of Major League Baseball’s amateur player draft began. The Houston Astros, thanks to their terribleness in 2012, had the number one pick and took the player ranked as the best one available, hard-throwing college pitcher Mark Appel. The Cincinnati Reds, for their part, took outfielder Phillip Ervin.

But the draft has problems and oftentimes isn’t fair to both players and teams. For example, since the new collective bargaining agreement, teams have a limit on the total amount of money they can spend on the entire draft. This varies depending on the number of picks the team has and where those picks fall. This leads to situations where a team picks a lower rated player in a higher round to save money for the rest of the draft.

Rany Jazayerli over at Grantland has a fantastic review of the process along with a proposal of how to fix it, starting off with a developer comparison that hits a little close to home.

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s say you’re a computer whiz. I don’t mean you were able to recover your Word document that one time when your Lenovo crashed — I mean you’re an absolute prodigy in front of a laptop. You taught yourself to code your own website when you were 9 years old. By the time you were 11, you were running a profitable side business consulting on software issues for your parents’ friends. You graduated from high school with straight A’s because you hacked into the system after catching WarGames on late-night TV. ?By the time you finish college, you’ve established a reputation as one of the brightest young minds in the computing industry. Google is interested in hiring you. Bigwigs at Apple have met you on campus for several friendly chats. Facebook follows you constantly — well, they follow everyone constantly, but in your case they’re tracking you with actual human beings. Yahoo sees you as a key piece in their rebuilding strategy. Twitter and LinkedIn have called.

And then, a week after graduation, you get a phone call. Microsoft is on the line — you’re their first-round pick! They’ve made you an offer for a fraction of what your value is worth on the open market. If you don’t agree to their contract, then you can’t work for any other tech company for another year — when some other company will draft you and you’ll go through the same process all over again.

You think Microsoft is terrible at developing programmers and that you won’t learn anything while working there? Tough. You were hoping to settle in Silicon Valley and have no interest in moving to Redmond? Sorry, bub. It was your childhood dream to work for Google? Maybe you’ll get to revisit that dream in 10 years, when you’re finally free to work for whoever you want.

Does this sound ridiculous? Congratulations! You’ve picked up on the inherent absurdity of the sports draft.

The lack of freedom in the system is ridiculous. Athletes have no choice of their employer, hoping to get lucky and end up with an organization that’s good for them. And now with the cap per pick, teams lack the freedom to go after the player they want the most if the amount it would take to sign him is too high.

Here’s Jazayerli’s proposed changes.

1. Assign every team a spending cap. (This limits costs, which will please owners.)

2. Allot the spending cap for each team based on where they finished in the standings the year before, allowing the worst teams to spend more in the draft than the best teams. (This helps maintain competitive balance.)

3. Let the free market reign.

This makes a lot of sense. It gives freedom to both players and teams, while still keeping costs limited, thanks to the overall cap. Plus, I think it would add further intrigue into the whole draft process, watching the bargaining going back and forth so much more actively between players and teams, and sometimes multiple teams. And that doesn’t even get into the discussions on the strategy of using your draft cap on one awesome talent or stocking up your minor leagues on a couple dozen lesser talents.

One thing I was surprised to learn is that this is the system that MLB is currently using for its international drafts. How ironic that the national system has less freedom and capitalism than the international one.

It’s obviously a long shot that MLB would make this change. Hell, they still haven’t fully embraced instant replay. I’d encourage you to read the rest of the articles. It’s got some great ideas on how to improve things.

As you probably noticed by the fact that he didn’t start yesterday’s game, Johnny Cueto is on the DL again. At least it’s not his oblique muscle again: this time he’s got a strained right shoulder.

He’s on the 15-day DL retroactive to his last start and they’re saying he’ll only miss a start or two (he’s already missed one, so they must mean another start or two). The Reds grabbed the guy who was going to be starting for the Bats, right-hander Pedro Villarreal, to start in Cueto’s place. Sucks to be the Bats, I guess.

Actually, sucks to be Villarreal. He wasn’t exactly up to the challenge last night. His 6 runs (earned) on 10 hits and 2 walks over 3.2 innings earned him the loss.

Not that he was the only one who stunk up the place. The bullpen combined to give up just as many runs. And the offense didn’t push enough across the place to win even if Villarreal’s innings had been the only ones that counted.

That’s 2 losses in a row now and 3 losses in the last 4 games. The team is still boasting a .600 record, second place in the NLC and third place in the NL, but this week’s losses have been dispiriting affairs. Over the last 7 days, Manny Parra has appeared in 3 games and has a 11.57 ERA, Joey Votto has an OBP of .200, and we lost Brandon Phillips to a HBP.

Good thing today is an off-day. I bet just about everyone could use it.

You might not remember Ramon Ortiz from his time with the Cincinnati Reds. He was in the starting rotation for the forgettable 2005 team and wasn’t the worst starter–Eric Milton and Luke Hudson were battling for that title. But I do remember his love of cutting the hair of his teammates.

Yesterday, his comeback attempt with the Toronto Blue Jays ended in a spectacularly painful and public fashion, as he felt a tear in his elbow after delivering a pitch.

You can tell Ortiz knows it’s the end. At 40, he’s not likely to come back from an extended rehab.

Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
Rockies (30-28)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	4	2
Reds (36-22)	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	2	-	3	9	0

Boxscore

This may not be fair to Bronson Arroyo, but it felt like forever since good-rroyo had shown up to put down the Cincinnati Reds’ opponent. Arroyo did that and then some this time against the Colorado Rockies, throwing 8 innings of shutout baseball to improve his record to 6-5.

In his 8 innings, Arroyo allowed 4 hits and struck out 3. After he was finished, Aroldis Chapman came on to pitch the 9th. Chapman was solid, walking one and recording 3 strikeouts to pick up his 15th save.

On the scoring side, the game was a pitcher’s duel. Until the 4th, the game was a shutout. However, in the fourth with two outs, Jay Bruce singled, continuing his improved May hitting into June. After Bruce stole second base, Todd Frazier singled to drive in the only run the Reds would need for the entire game.

Bruce added some insurance runs in the 8th with his 9th home run, driving in Zach Cozart. After that, there was no doubt about it. The Reds won, erasing that last loss to the Pirates from the fans’ memory and keeping pace with the first place St. Louis Cardinals.

The Reds go for the series win today when they send Homer Bailey out against Juan Nicasio.