Good morning and welcome to episode 623 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball

Perspectus presented by the play index at baseballreference.com.

I'm Ben Lindbergh of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus, hello Sam.

And we're doing the Cincinnati Reds preview podcast today, later in the show,

Sahada Sharma will be speaking to C. Trent Rose Cranes from the Cincinnati Inquirer,

but we have the pleasure of speaking to baseballers' spectaces, Arjay Anderson, who wrote the Reds

essay for the annual. Hey Arjay, how you doing? All right, so give us a sense of what things

looked like heading into the off season for the Reds. You wrote a bit about this in your essay,

but financially payroll wise and player personnel wise, what were the constraints they were

operating under as they headed into November? Well, they ran a tough spot because after this season,

were there five starting pictures with qualified for free agency. And obviously, Cincinnati is not

the largest market out there. So while their payroll has been pretty high by their standards and

has increased a lot in recent years, it was still just about major league average. And if you're

Walt Jockety, you have Johnny Quedo, Matt Latos, Homer Bailey is obviously locked up. But then you

have Alfredo Simon, a Mike Lee, at the back end. Four of those are about to leave. You have to make

some tough decisions. So he did that by trading off Simon and Latos. And now they're in a situation

where they have to look to youth because they didn't make many big off season additions.

So they're in a weird situation. It's probably not going to be a fun year in Cincinnati as a result.

And so what do you think of the rotation choices they made if they had to get rid of some guys and

keep others? Would you have kept the ones they kept and gotten rid of the ones they got rid of?

Oh yeah, I would have kept Quedo and Lake, excuse me. Quedo is the best at the bunch.

Latos has injury issues of a zone to deal with. And with Lee can Simon, Simon had a good season.

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