The Louisville Bats have the worst record among the teams in the Cincinnati Reds farm system. They are currently sitting at 4-8. The team isn’t without a few guys that are playing well early on this season, though. Alfredo Rodriguez is having the best two weeks of his life at the plate right now. The shortstop is hitting .361/.465/.528 on the year with five walks and just four strikeouts through 12 games played.
We are dealing with a very small sample size here for Alfredo Rodriguez, but it’s tough to find another time in his career where he’s hit for both average and power even in a sample size this small. To be blunt – he’s simply struggled to hit for the overwhelming majority of his career. In 2019 he did hit .286 with the Chattanooga Lookouts in the first four months of the minor league season before he was promoted to Triple-A Louisville. But despite a .286 average he slugged just .347, leaving him as a below-league average bat (overall – not compared to other shortstops in the league). When he arrived in Louisville for the final month of the year he hit .169/.261/.221. For his career he has a .316 slugging percentage.
With Eugenio Suárez struggling both at the plate, but more importantly to this discussion, in the field, there have been suggestions from readers of this and other websites to call up Alfredo Rodriguez to take over at shortstop for the Reds. Rodriguez can absolutely play a better defensive shortstop than anyone on the current big league roster. But the defense has never once been questionable – it’s always been about whether or not he could hit enough.
Last season when Freddy Galvis wasn’t getting it done, the Reds turned to Jose Garcia who had never played above the Advanced-A level. Garcia, too, has an outstanding glove (and arm, for that matter). He was simply overmatched at the plate. The Reds decided that he was the better option over Alfredo Rodriguez, who was also at the team’s alternate training site last summer. While we don’t know exactly how Rodriguez was hitting in Mason last summer, the evidence would suggest that it probably wasn’t anything like he’s hit these first two weeks this season.
Looking into the numbers for Alfredo Rodriguez we can see a few things – his walk rate is at a career high, and his strikeout rate is at a career low. Both of those are very good things to see, and his strikeout rate in particular is at an elite level currently. Of course that’s if it were to be translated to the Major Leagues and we don’t really know if that would be the case. But it’s what’s happening in the batted ball categories that shines a light on things.
For his career, Alfredo Rodriguez has been a guy who has hit a ton of ground balls. His career rate is 50%. This season his ground ball rate is just 29%. Rodriguez is getting the ball in the air a lot more than usual. And it’s been working. The thing is, it’s not so much that he’s replacing ground balls with fly balls – his fly ball rate is right where his career rate has always been – he’s replacing ground balls with line drives. His current line drive rate is 39%! For perspective on that, the Major League Baseball average is 21%. Only two players with at least 50 plate appearances have a higher rate than that (344 players have met that threshold this season).
The Cincinnati Reds have far more detailed data on guys. They know the exit velocity for Alfredo Rodriguez. They know the launch angle for his batted balls. Those things are likely strong indicators, when given enough of a sample size, to tell us if what he’s doing is sustainable (to an extent – of course he’s not a .351 hitter, no one is). The public, though, doesn’t have access to that data, so we aren’t working with the type of accuracy they are.
As to whether or not the Reds should call up Alfredo Rodriguez to play shortstop…. it’s not an easy answer. Right now the position is sort-of-kind-of open. Eugenio Suárez and Kyle Farmer are both playing it right now, but that’s only because Joey Votto is out of the lineup, which is opening up first base and that’s slid Mike Moustakas over there and allowed the team to improve their defense by shifting Suárez back to third and Farmer to short. But Joey Votto’s only going to miss another two weeks or so and then, it would seem, Suárez is heading back to shortstop nearly every day.
The other option would be to bench or demote Jonathan India, which would open up second base for Mike Moustakas, opening up third base for Eugenio Suárez, and then shortstop would be open for the taking.
It’s not impossible to think that the team would somehow prefer a scenario like that one that has Alfredo Rodriguez on the team instead of Jonathan India, but it’s a very unlikely one.
Let’s all hope that whatever it is that’s led to Alfredo Rodriguez torching the Triple-A East continues. He’s having an outstanding start to the year. He’s making tons of contact, he’s drawing plenty of walks, and for now he’s lining the ball all over the field. The newest data is always more important than the older data – but the older data has a sample size that’s 100 times larger, too. If Rodriguez continues to hit, and show that he’s capable of hitting the ball hard enough to keep pitchers and defenses honest – it would make sense to come back to the conversation of calling him up to play shortstop in the future if the team still needs an answer there. But given the long history of his inability to hit the ball out of the infield, it feels too early to make that decision over a two week start that has been outstanding.
Tony Santillan is making his case
Last night saw another strong start for Tony Santillan. His third start of the year for Triple-A Louisville was also his best start. The right-handed pitcher threw 6.0 shutout innings for the Bats while striking out seven hitters. Santillan dropped his ERA to 0.64 through his three games and now has 20 strikeouts with just four walks in 14.0 innings. He’s yet to allow a home run to any of the 55 batters that he’s faced.
There’s been some inconsistency from Santillan in the past. Both in terms of his control from game-to-game, and even at times from inning-to-inning, as well as his velocity. Last night the velocity was strong as he was sitting 94-95 and topped out at 97 MPH on the final pitch of his outing. But last night it was more about his slider, which had the Memphis hitters off balance and often confused.
Cincinnati’s 5th spot in the rotation is currently held by Jeff Hoffman. He had a solid start to the season but he hasn’t thrown a pitch in the 5th inning in any of his last four starts. In that same span he’s posted a 7.53 ERA with 11 walks and 16 strikeouts in 14.1 innings. If that trend continues for much longer the Reds are likely going to be looking for alternatives and right now that might be Santillan.
Carson Spiers keeps it going in Daytona
Entering the series against Jupiter this week the Daytona Tortugas led the Low-A Southest in team ERA with a 2.45 mark. That was more than a run better than the team that was sitting in second place in the league in that category. And then they played the game on Tuesday night and lowered it to 2.34.
Carson Spiers, who spent four years at Clemson, and played college summer ball two years as well, never once made a start during his collegiate career. The Reds saw something that they thought would work and transitioned the right-hander to the rotation and assigned him to Daytona. Last night he fired out 6.0 innings and allowed an earned run. He also struck out eight batters without a walk.
Spiers, despite being a reliever in the past, is throwing four different pitches in Daytona right now. He’s got a fastball, two breaking balls, and a change up. And he’s pounding the strikezone with all of it. He’s currently thrown 16.2 innings and posted a 1.08 ERA with just three walks and he’s racked up 21 strikeouts along the way.