Well, the Reds may have been unable to take their thirteenth consecutive win at Wrigley Field today, but how about that Curtis Partch, huh? He wasn’t so much his first time out, but tonight he soaked up four of the fourteen innings in that debacle against the Cubs. Even Mat Latos only pitched six.

And they were four scoreless innings at that. Only 1 hit and 4 strike-outs. Of course, neither team was doing much offensively with those crazy shadows all over the infield, but you can’t knock Partch for that. Dude was called on to keep the Cubbies scoress until the Reds took the lead, and he did as well as could be expected considering that the Reds never took the lead. The guy even batted once.

Which brings up another salient point: Curtis Partch can’t hit. He might want to work on his game at the plate.

Meanwhile, it hindsight it looks pretty weird that the Reds lost in 14 innings and Aroldis Chapman never threw a pitch. Maybe the rule ought to be that Chapman is the second-to-last resort behind Jonathan “I’m apparently not available until the choice is between me and Chapman” Broxton. Alas poor Broxton. Does his apparently injured and velocity-impaired self really deserve the loss?

Oh, and by the way, Sam LeCure was the one to give up the lead the Reds had and force his game into all these extra innings in the first place. He’s got to be hurt at this point, right? The kind of hurt that pitchers don’t know they have because they have a constant level of pain that drowns everything else out anyway?

Oh well, tomorrow is another day, when the Reds will be back home to host the Brewers. For everyone’s sake, I hope at least 1 guy has been put on the DL by then.

The Reds sent me an email this weekend to let me know that Joey Votto and Brandon Phillips are currently the leading All Star Game vote-getters in the NL for their positions. At that time, Votto had 1,569,477 votes. Who’s in second and how much does he trail by? The email didn’t go into that kind of detail.

Getting any kind of details on where the voting stands in the All-Star Game is like pulling teeth. Before I started writing this post I combed through a week’s worth of archives on MLB.com looking for the numbers without any luck. I did stumble upon this old press release, though:

For the first time ever, All-Star Game balloting updates will be revealed live on television over the weekend, as part of MLB national broadcasts on FOX and ESPN.

This Saturday, June 8th, and next Saturday, June 15th, FOX will exclusively reveal updated voting totals for the American League starters as part of its “Baseball Night in America” pre-game show at 7:00 p.m. ET before its slate of prime time games begins.

This Sunday, June 9th, and next Sunday, June 16th, ESPN will exclusively reveal updated voting totals for the National League starters during “Baseball Tonight” at 7:00 p.m. ET prior to its Sunday Night Baseball telecast.

Well that explains it. They’re not going to give away information for free online when they want to force you to watch FOX and ESPN for it. I’m only surprised that they didn’t put it on MLB Network.

I didn’t catch the numbers last weekend, and I probably won’t next weekend either, but I can guess that Votto is leading his spot by a wide margin. The Reds know that you can motivate this fan base to vote in mass quantities with a close race. It follows that a landslide victory will cause fans to shrug and figure the All Star situation is taken care of, so they’d want to keep a big lead quiet.

On the other hand, they did give the numbers for Phillips. At that time he had 1,541,720 and was leading the Giants’ Marco Scutaro’s 1,285,076. While not a for-sure lead, that’s not exactly the kind of challenge that Reds fans took on to get Votto in as the 25th man a couple years ago. Maybe we should aim for something a little less likely. See if we can get Ryan Ludwick voted in. He ought to be just about off the DL by then.

Before tonight’s game against the Chicago Cubs, the Cincinnati Reds called up Tony Cingrani to make a start in the place of disabled ace Johnny Cueto. Henry Rodriguez was sent down to Louisville to make room on the active roster.

But this may be just a single game appearance for Cingrani this time. During Cueto’s previous time on the disabled list, Cingrani made six starts and acquitted himself well. The Reds are expecting Cueto to be ready to go the next time his turn comes in the rotation.

“I felt really good,” Cueto said after the throwing session at Wrigley Field. “I feel ready now.”

This is good news. Of course, Cueto’s absence has not been felt strongly at all, thanks to Cingrani. I wonder, though, is there any chance of having Cingrani stay around to shore up the bullpen? The relievers need the help far more than the starters.

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.