Welcome Mat Latos

24-year-old Mat Latos boasts a
career 3.37 ERA

It seems an appropriate time to launch a labor-of-love blog largely about the Cincinnati Reds on the heels of their largest team deal in the Walt Jocketty era. Sorry Scott – we all love you – but Saturday’s trade for San Diego righty Mat Latos had the number of pieces flying around that signature trades are made of, for better or worse. The move gives the Redlegs a healthy one-two punch of Cueto-Latos at the top of their pitching rotation in 2012 while the club affordably maintains team control of the young pitcher for the next four years.

The trade is one that has polarized a lot of opinions of Reds fans and baseball analysts alike due to the high cost of bringing Mat to Cincinnati. The Reds sent highly-touted prospects Yonder Alonso, Yasmani Grandal, Brad Boxberger and pitcher Edinson Volquez to San Diego, effectively signifying that the Reds first priority is to make a run at it during Joey Votto’s final contract years. There’s no question that top of the rotation pitching was a need for the Reds this offseason and after being involved in rumors with James Shield, Jair Jurrjens and Gio Gonzalez, they finally had a deal they could pull the trigger on.

In addition to filling out a spot in the rotation going into 2012, Mat Latos comes with four years of team control and the move saved the Reds a few million dollars to potentially play in free agency with. But as is always the question with such a trade, you have to wonder who won. And the answer is, well, that it’s hard to answer. But I’ll try to add some context to the deal.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

I want to go on record saying that in four years, or perhaps even sooner, the Padres are going to be able to look at this trade on paper and make the argument that they got the better value in the end. Alonso’s burst onto the scene in late 2011 backed up a stellar minor league resume that had the young first basemen ranked as the club’s third best prospect by Baseball America. The loss of catcher Yasmani Grandal, the fourth-ranked prospect, was another shot to the depth of the current farm system. That said anyone who has been following the swirling speculation around the Reds' desire to trade for a top of the rotation arm had to just about see the writing on the wall for those two prospects if such a deal was going to be struck.

Prospect Yonder Alonso is among the four
Reds heading to San Diego.

With former-MVP Joey Votto anchoring the Reds at first through 2013 and top prospect Devin Mesoroco projected to play a prominent role in the Reds 2012 catching battery, both Grandal and Alonso were blocked from contributing significantly for the next few seasons. While the club kicked the tires on Alonso in left field, you never quite got the feeling that they were comfortable with him there full time due to his less than premium defense. 

Also headed to San Diego are reliever Brad Boxberger and the enigmatic Edinson Volquez. Boxberger was really starting to come into his own in the minors last year and seemed destined to make the Reds bullpen sooner than later. Of all the pieces involved in this trade, Brad was perhaps the most unexpected. But, Reds GM Walt Jocketty said shortly after the trade that he didn’t “think we would have been able to make the deal” without him. At the end of the day, it’s hard to get too hung up on trading away a reliever for a power pitching potential ace along with surplus pieces to the organization.

Reds nation basically ran completely out of patience of the 28-year old Volquez after his Opening Day nod last season. After being acquired through the infamous Josh Hamilton trade, Volquez had a stellar debut for the 2008 Reds posting a 3.21 ERA and a 17-6 record along with a trip to the 2008 All-Star game. It’s safe to say that as far as the Reds are concerned, Edinson peaked early. Following a PED indictment, Tommy John surgery and a 2011 campaign that saw him demoted to AAA Louisville not once, but twice, a change of scenery will probably do well for both the Reds and Volquez alike, who stands to benefit from the cavernous dimensions of Petco Park.  

The return for the Redlegs is a 24 year old pitcher with potential one or two in the rotation stuff. Latos has four pitches in his arsenal with a low-to-mid-90’s fastball and career 3.37 ERA. After a stellar 2010 that saw the right hander go 14-10 with a 2.92 ERA, Latos had consistency issues in the first half of 2011 and had lost a few miles per hour from his velocity going 5-10 through his first 17 games with shoulder issues. But he seemed to have really found his groove after the Midsummer Classic, posting a 2.87 ERA through the final fourteen games and pushing his strikeout-to-walk ratio to nearly 4. He had a WHIP ratio of 1.00 and nearly averaged one strikeout for every inning pitched.

The Smallpark Beckons

There is usually a deserved guard that goes up when conversations around San Diego’s pitching come up. Indeed Petco Park is arguably the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball, despite it being edged out by Tropicana Field and AT&T Park in MLB park ratings. Even casual Reds fans are fairly well-aware that the opposite is true in Cincinnati. Great American has been called a “bandbox” and is endearingly referred to as “Great American Smallpark” by Cincinnatians with good taste. While pitching in Petco is worlds away from pitching at Great American, there is plenty of evidence that Latos is well-equipped to overcome the change in ballpark dimensions. 

It is worth noting that Latos’ peripherals have been better at home than they have on the road in his career… but barely. Last season, Latos had a 3.24 ERA and a 3.50 strikeout-to-walk ratio in the confines of Petco, while going 3.68 with a 2.61 SO/BB on the road. Over his three year career, he’s managed a 3.11 ERA in San Diego and a 3.57 mark on the road. There is discrepancy there, some of which can certainly be written off to Petco. But his peripherals indicate that Mat Latos could manage just fine in another ballpark.

Latos’ fielding independent pitching number is 3.28 over his career and he is in a position to maintain a continually low batting average on balls in play due to Cincinnati’s stellar defense. The home-away splits are not drastically out of line with what you would expect any home-away split to be, ballpark dimensions aside. His peripherals were virtually consistent whatever venue he was playing in. In fact, his homerun total in his career is almost inexplicably higher at Petco than it has been on the road. It is also worth noting that he has pitched almost 60 more innings on the road than at home in his career.
 

In his career, Mat has given up about .8 homeruns per nine innings pitched. This number isn’t staggering or particularly exceptional by any means, but it thankfully isn’t Bronson Arroyo territory either. Last year, Latos struck out over 8.5 batters per nine innings and walked an average of three per nine. He posted a groundball percentage of 43% and though he is also a bit of a fly ball pitcher at times, his strong strikeout numbers should keep him balanced enough to overcome the new park. Last year, despite a rougher first half, he had a better groundball to flyball ratio than Clayton Kershaw. Splits aside, even looking at the "away" statistics for SO/BB (2.61) and ERA (3.68), Mat's numbers are both better than Cueto's career averages, who stands to continue to improve as well.

At a great cost, the Reds have certainly upgraded their rotation with this move and Latos could easily project to be a 4 – 4.5 WAR arm and 15 or 16 game winner in Cincinnati should the Reds bounce back as a team from a disappointing effort in 2011.

Some Final Thoughts

• Yonder Alonso on paper didn’t seem like a great fit for the Padres who acquired 22-year-old first base prospect Anthony Rizzo when the team moved Adrian Gonzalez to Boston. Rizzo hit .331 with 26 homers and 101 RBIs in AAA before hitting .141 in San Diego towards the end of the last season. Rizzo struck out 46 times, but only has a 128 at-bat sample. With Yonder not being a good fit for Cincinnati’s left field, it’s hard to imagine him ending up in Petco’s large outfield corners. Expect the Padres to trade one of the two pieces with teams like Chicago, Toronto and Tampa in need of a long-term answer at first.
  
  
• Edinson Volquez is a pitcher who stands to greatly benefit from his move to San Diego. Volquez achieved a hard to achieve feat last year posting a homerun to fly ball ratio north of 20%. Assuming he can continue to improve on his walks another year removed from Tommy John, the larger dimensions of Petco should substantially contribute to keeping more balls in the yard. With a hole in their rotation now, don’t expect the drop-off from Latos to Volquez to necessarily be as significant as it may seem. That said, the Padres have much, much larger issues that would likely have limited Latos’ value next season as well.
  
  
• To me, this is a classic quantity-for-quality win-win trade and I expect both teams to get good value out of it. With the rest of the NL Central in a bit of a transition, the time has never been better for the Reds to deal from surplus to open a window. If they can do well over Votto’s final two seasons (and Latos should help), we can only hope team revenue and attendance will increase to continue a competitive run for the second half of Mat’s four years of team control.