Reviewing Eno Sarris’ Bold Predictions

I usually get three or four of these Bold Predictions right every year, and I’ve grown comfortable with that level of success. Any more and they aren’t bold enough, any less, and they’re useless. That said, wait till you see number one. It’s a doozy. It’s *so* wrong that it should probably invalidate all my hits. It’s *so* wrong that I’m questioning why any of you are here right now. It’s *so* wrong I want to throw crap.

1) There will be three top thirty starters on the Reds this year.

Hey, guess who was the 31st-best starting pitcher this year, according to Yahoo’s rankings? Dan Straily! He wasn’t even on the team when I wrote this piece of turd prediction. Anthony DeSclafani got hurt. Raisel Iglesias got hurt and ended up in the pen. Brandon Finnegan got hurt, lost his velocity, and lost his confidence in the change. Homer Bailey never got healthy.

John Lamb… This one hurts the most. He didn’t get healthy for a while, maybe that was it, but when he was in, he gave up nearly two homers per nine innings. His slower, slower, slowest arsenal never got going, even though I think it still can. Could the problem be his body language on the mound, as one team official suggested to me? Or maybe it’s just command. He can’t throw his interesting secondary stuff if his fastballs aren’t getting him ahead in counts, and he can’t throw his fastball in the zone if they are getting obliterated.

There’s hope that next year changes the calculus on this disasterpiece prediction. A healthy year from DeSclafani seems likely to be worth a top-30 ranking. Iglesias has the stuff, and he’ll get another try at the rotation. Finnegan started throwing his change more late in the year, and once he did that, he had a 2.37 ERA and nearly 12 strikeouts per nine. Of course, his velocity was up a bit, too. If those things hold… the team has steady Eddie Straily and Cody Reed’s knockout stuff with terrible command behind them.

None of that changes that, this year, the Reds had the worst starting staff of all time.

0-for-1. Or more like -10000000000-for-1.

2) Marcell Ozuna will hit more than 25 homers.

Dammit. Dammit. So close. 23 homers. A good year. I don’t feel particularly bad about this one but I said 25, so it’s a miss.

Can he do more? He’ll be 26 next year. He hit more fly balls and pulled more of them. It all looks fairly organic, since you normally hit more fly balls as you age, and he’s pulled more balls in the past. Barry Bonds is gone, but Ozuna also works with the same hitting coach as Edwin Encarnacion, Robinson Cano, and Eduardo Nunez in the offseason. I’m was a fan and still am, even if the return was modest. He beat his projections by five to seven home runs, though.

0-for-2.

3) This year, Jumbo Diaz or Hunter Strickland becomes a closer.

Hey! Strickland closed for, like, a few days! Victory! And now the 87-mph former closer, not closer, closer again Sergio Romo has taken his job because Strickland seemingly can’t trust his secondary stuff enough, and… I dunno, had a few blowups at the wrong moment? That’s all I got. I still like him. I’ll take this one, though, because I missed Ozuna by two homers.

1-for-3.

4) Jake Lamb will hit 20 home runs.

Huzzah! 29 homers! I almost wrote thirty and wouldn’t it have been funny if I’d been one short of another breakout? No, it would not have been funny. But this Lamb rode some pre-season swing adjustments into a breakout born also of his excellent exit velocity. The .249 batting average is probably here to stay, since he’s willing to strike out to get his homers, but it was still worthy of a top-ten ranking at third base by the end of the year, and even with the late-season swoon, I find it sustainable given his underlying skills.

2-for-4.

5) Shelby Miller will make me happy I didn’t trade him.

Shut up.

2-for-5.

6) Chris Coghlan fights his way into starting status in all leagues.

Hey, all said, Coghlan was pretty good! 34% worse than league average with the bat and a minus on defense! Wait. Dammit. Part-time play didn’t allow him to get his authority on batted balls back, and though he still kept his decent walk rate, the power never surfaced. He’s useful, but probably not a starter in the league.

2-for-6.

7) This year, Kevin Gausman finally cashes in on his natural talent.

Here’s a good one. A top 50 season out of Gausman makes this a win, considering he looked like a deep league pitcher at best in the past. He still gave up home runs, but not really on the curve, his new breaking ball that helped him get out of sticky situations. I’d expect him to give up fewer homers next year, and have a more normal strand rate, and do about the same thing in sum. If he wants to take another step forward, I think he needs a cutter. That won’t happen in Baltimore.

3-for-7.

8) Brandon Belt is a top five first baseman.

Belt did some nice things, actually. He improved his strikeout rate, and his walk rate, and kept his power level, and his plus batting average on balls in play. He also played another 100 plate appearances more than last year. All of that was supposed to go hand in hand with better play from the Giants and a good lineup position to give him plus runs and RBI totals.

Somewhere along the way, though, his team didn’t get the message that he is a great number two hitter. He spent most of the year batting fourth or lower in the lineup and getting crap from Brian Sabean for not being a cleanup hitter. The team scored runs early, and then dropped to the bottom of the league in the second half. So Belt ended up being the twelfth-best first baseman (not counting the third basemen and outfielders that have first base eligibility). Okay, but not good enough.

3-for-8.

9) Rubby de la Rosa makes you not want to swallow your puke.

What a terrible way to word this terrible prediction! I mean, who wants to swallow their puke? And a season that ranked about 155th, a smidge better than Nathan Eovaldi’s train wreck of a season, does that make you want to puke, or puke and swallow, or just swallow hard, or what?

I still like the harder slider. I don’t get why that changeup isn’t working, but he’s using it less now, and it’s still getting nearly 20% whiffs. It still gets spanked. He still has terrible command, and health. He’s only interesting in the very deepest of leagues until one of these things changes.

3-for-9.

10) Brett Lawrie is a top half second baseman when it’s all over.

“This one is simple,” I wrote. This one is simple! Yeah it’s simple you idiot. Here’s a guy with a history of injuries and league average offense. He’s in his mid-twenties, yes, but he’s already logged two thousand plate appearances and we know pretty much that he’ll show league average power and steal a few bases. I guess, if he’d been healthy all year, he could have been a top-six first baseman, maybe. He did like his new park, and would have graded out to a 19/11 season in 600 plate appearances. He’s managed that many plate appearances once in his five-year career. I’m done.

3-for-10.