The 2023 Cincinnati Reds are bound to be terrible. Their ownership has treated the team like a sinking ship ever since they went for it all prior to the 2020 pandemic-shortened season, and it doesn’t seem like the actual players on the field will be responding much to that criticism. Long gone are the days of Mike Moustakas, Jesse Winker, Eugenio Suarez, or a prime Joey Votto. Eno Sarris of The Athletic just published a piece on certain players bound to bounce back this year in the hitting department, which included 2021 NL Rookie of the Year Jonathan India, but other than that and the idea that hyped prospect Noelvi Marte could debut soon, there isn’t much to be happy about with the Reds’ Starting 9.
It's a different story with the pitchers, however, who are certainly depleted, but in different ways. Luis Castillo and Tyler Mahle were traded at the Deadline last year, meaning that the prominent figures of the Reds pitching staff are some of the most hyped young pitchers in baseball. Graham Ashcraft is perhaps the least hyped of the bunch, but he’s only 24 and has enough upside after an okay rookie season to keep the hype train on the tracks. The most anticipated seasons, however, are coming from Hunter Greene and Nick Lodolo, longtime top prospects in the Reds system who debuted last year to varying results. Greene’s fastball regularly touched over 100mph, but a 4.44 ERA leads some to believe that perhaps that fastball shouldn’t be used as much. Lodolo’s first season in Cinci wasn’t as discussed, even though it was more solid, but a below-average hard-hit rate isn’t going to do him much good in the future.
And then there’s closer Alexis Diaz, the brother of Edwin, who struck out batters at such an exorbitantly efficient rate last year with such awesome peripherals that it’s almost hard to critique his pitching style, except for one simple metric: walks. Alexis Diaz, who is only 26 years old, walked 4.7 batters per nine innings last year, which, per Baseball Savant, is in the 2nd percentile among qualified pitchers. Greene and Lodolo also suffered from bad walk rates, and although they weren’t as bad as Diaz’s, so did the rest of the Reds’ pitchers. In fact, Cincinnati Reds pitchers had the worst walks per nine innings in all of baseball at 3.9 BB/9 in 2022. That means that the problem is systemic, but it means that the solution is systemic, too: just stop walking hitters.
Simple enough, right? Well, not really, but it certainly can be. It just requires tweaking to the overall pitching strategy of a rotation. I think there are plenty of reasons to expect the Reds to improve on their terrible 2022 walk rates, just because they have so many young, promising pitchers relying on leadership and education that it would be wasted talent if they never improved, but it would come at the sacrifice of their elite, elite fastballs. Greene and Diaz suffer from this in particular, who rely so much more on swings and misses, which they induce at great rates, that it causes them to throw wildly. Lodolo isn’t entirely the same, but his problem with walking batters is in the same general family: he gets hit around so much that he has to throw the ball out of the zone so it doesn’t get pummeled.
I’ll say this: the 2023 Cincinnati Reds are going to be bad. They will probably finish dead last in a middle-of-the-road NL Central by a long shot, and ownership will continue to threaten to move, sell, or disband the team (jeez, they really suck). But what we have here is a glaring problem that has to be solved. Baseball loves talking about underlying numbers (and so do I), when sometimes, the biggest problems are right in front of us. Walking batters is not good, period. So, let’s just make some minor tweaks to improve the impact of the problem. Throw a couple more balls in the strike zone, stop relying too much on fastballs, and learn to outsmart hitters instead of overpowering them. Come on, Cinci, be an exemplar here. Make me right. Look at the overlying numbers!
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