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Hall of Fame baseball writer Hal McCoy has retired from the Dayton Daily News after covering the Cincinnati Reds for 37 years. Hal's blog, though, will continue to be a must-read for Reds fans. He'll share his thoughts on the team this season and will file updates from Great American Ball Park. You also can catch Hal in print every Sunday in his popular Ask Hal columnHome > Blogs > The Real McCoy | Cincinnati Reds baseball news > Archives > 2009 > November > 17
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Ramon Hernandez: a good signing
Ramon Hernandez is the kind of guy I want around when I want to have fun and a guy I want to have around when I need somebody to watch my back.
He’ll do both and he’ll be a leader doing it.
That’s why it is a good thing for the Cincinnati Reds that Hernandez is returning and it was a good thing for the Reds that he was only able to play 81 games last season because of a knee injury.
That meant that few other teams would be interested in the 33-year-old catcher at inflated free agent prices. And it meant that the Reds could turn down his $8.5 million option for 2010 and sign him for a reduced rate of $3 million.
When the Reds traded Ryan Freel and two minor leaguers for Hernandez before last season, some Baltimore media said he was a bad guy, a surly guy, a guy who stirred up trouble in the clubhouse.
That never surfaced last season. Not once. He was nothing but smiles and politeness. He was a hard worker. He continued to work hard after knee surgery.
And most importantly, with a fairly large and young Latino contingent on the Reds, he was a leader.
Every morning during spring training, Hernandez and most of the Latins were seated at a picnic table near the front of the clubhouse, enjoying breakfast together, chattering in rapid-fire Spanish and laughing uproariously. Hernandez and veteran closer Coco Cordero were the leaders.
In the home clubhouse in Great American Ball Park, there is a cluster of four black leather couches forming a square. It used to be the home of Ken Griffey Jr. and Adam Dunn - a place where they sat to eat or play cards or just congregate with other players.
After Griffey and Dunn were traded, Hernandez and Cordero and the other Latins, like pitchers Johnny Cueto and Edinson Volquez, commandeered the four couches and it became known as The Latin Quarter.
If Cordero is traded, as he should be, Hernandez becomes the sole leader of the Latins and they would be in good hands.
I was impressed with Hernandez on the first day of workouts last spring training. There is an area at the Sarasota Sports Complex where there are eight mounds side-by-side and eight home plates side-by-side.
That’s where pitchers throw every other day during their early workouts and on that first day Hernandez’s voice rose high above the other seven catchers and he encouraged the pitchers. I loved it when I heard him extolling and cajoling Homer Bailey.
I also heard that the Latins were looking for an authentic Caribbean or South American style restaurant. I took Hernandez a menu from Bill Casto’s El Meson restaurant in West Carollton. He grabbed the menu, checked it out, then called a meeting at the Latin Quarter and invited all the Spanish-speaking players to an outing to the El Meson, on him.
Hernandez hit only .258 last year with five homers and 37 RBIs, but did a lot of damage early in the season, hit a few key home runs and drove in some important runs, before his knee rebelled. That happened early in the season and he kept trying to play until he couldn’t bend it to kneel. He had surgery on July 21 and figured to be out the rest of the season, but worked diligently and returned September 19.
Hernandez did win the Most Outstanding Player award for the Ohio Cup (the six-game series against the Cleveland Indians) with three three-hit games against the Tribe.
Hey, MOP of the Ohio Cup? What more could you ask?
SOME INTERESTING numbers from last season:
This comes as zero surprise to anybody with a whiff of baseball intelligence, but Cincinnati outfielder Willy Taveras has the lowest GPA (.191) of any player in the majors with at least 400 plate appearances.
What’s GPA? It is called Gross Production Average - a statistic conjured by the numbers seamheads and is a variation of OPS, only supposedly more accurate.
Anyway, Taveras was the worst.
And here’s another:
Jay Bruce’s LD percentage of 13 percent was the lowest of any player in the majors with at least 300 plate appearances. LD stands for line drive and means that Bruce hit line drives only 13 percent of the time - or 87 percent of the time he hit fly balls, ground balls or struck out.
One final seamhead number (they are interesting but I sometimes wonder what they really mean): Aaron Haran’gs LD % was 24 percent, lowest of any major-league pitcher with at least 162 innings pitched. That means he gave up fewer line drives than any pitcher in the game.
But the DER behind Harang was .659, lowest of any major-league pitcher with more than 162 innings. DER? That’s Defense Efficiency Ratio, or the percentage of times a batted ball is turned into an out, not counting home runs.
In other words, of all the balls hit against Harang that weren’t home runs, the defense turned fewer of them into outs than the percentage of any pitcher in baseball.
And to that, Harang would say (but not out loud), “I hear that.”
ENOUGH WITH goofy, but interesting, numbers.
When the City of Englewood decided to have a day for me Sunday, complete with a gathering at the Government Center, I feared Nadine and I would be the only ones there because the Bengals and Steelers were on TV.
To my surprise and delight, a crowd nearly filled the room and we had a great hour-and-a-half talking baseball and the Cincinnati Reds. Thanks to all of you. It was a fun day. And thanks to the City of Englewood.
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