So I am getting pretty stoked on the work that Kevin Dame is doing over at The Hardball Times in his "Visual Baseball" series where he interprets Baseball Data with graphics. In his most recent article he represented the 2010 Mariners hitters vs the rest of the leagues starters in OPS. I liked the idea and how it was represented. I tweaked a few things though and decided to just use the position for each team and ranked them by OPS+ since it adjusts for the park one plays in. Here are the results for our 2009 Reds:

You may want to click and open it in a larger window to get the full view. The one thing that surprised me was just how well our right fielders performed in 2009. The next thing was second base. I give Brandon Phillips my share of crap around the internet because I feel fans overrate his bat dramatically because of his RBI numbers 'being so good'. With that said, for national leaguers he was quite good at the plate. He still is in the wrong spot in the lineup by far, but that one isn't on him at all.

What does it all mean? Well, looking at those rankings what spots do you think the Reds can improve upon in 2010? What about spots you see a decline at? Here are my thinkings, feel free to share yours:

Improvement Positions:

Center - Its going to be tough to be as bad in center next season. Even Willy Taveras playing there next year is likely to be much better than he was in 2009. Given that Stubbs is likely to see most of the time there, even the most pessimistic on Stubbs think he will hit better than Taveras did in 2009.

Third Base - Scott Rolen makes a lot of his value on the other side of the ball, but even at this point in his career he should very much be expected to provide better offense than what Edwin and Rosales brought to us in 2009.

Declining Positions:

First Base - Call me a pessimist if you will, but I don't expect Votto to replicate another .375 BABIP season in 2010. If he falls down even to a .325 BABIP he would have to have the same rate of strikeouts, walks, HBP, SF and SH while hitting 42 doubles and 35 HR to have a .979 OPS. I just don't expect that big of a jump in power for Votto. I think he can be around the .900 OPS range, but he isn't likely to sniff .950+ again this year.

The Rest

I expect just about every other position to be about where they were. I think Jay Bruce picks up the slack in 2010 and makes up for the guys who filled in for him very well in the season. We have the same catchers back and while Corky Miller and Craig Tatum did get some playing time I figure they wind up in roughly the same area overall.

Anyways, that is my opinion. What about you guys?

ProjectProspect.com has now gone through and made a Top 15 for all positions and a Top 30 for Pitchers. What I did was assign points based on all of that. 2 points for a 15 vote and 30 for a 1 vote. For the pitchers I just went 30-1 in points for the 1-30 spots. I added up all the teams points, multiplied by 2 then divided by 10 to give a Font Size to put the team name in the graphic. The idea came off of the work that Kevin Dame is doing at TheHardballTimes.com and I thought it was a pretty cool way to represent certain things. Obviously this is a little rough because there are some stronger positions and some weaker ones (2B jumped out to me as one of the weaker spots), but still I think it gives a decent look at the farm systems in baseball, at least as far as the teams Top 10's go (Boston actually had 12 players listed, San Diego was 2nd with 9). Here is what the graphic wound up looking like:

I plan to do something similar once John comes out with his Top 20s for each team, assigning point values for each grade, but that is a ways off still.

via minorleaguenotebook.com

I took in Ethan Martin's last start when he came through Dayton. I have some video up with a little bit of a scouting report Here.

He topped out at 95 a few different times. Inconsistent offspeed stuff, but flashed itself as very good.

There is also about 6 or 7 other videos of Martin ptiching over on my youtube page. Also videos of Devaris Gordon, Austin Gallagher and of course a ton of Reds videos.