Reviews, Previews, and Ranks: Cincinnati Reds
Introduction & Glossary Post Here
The Reds tied the Pirates for last in the NL Central going 62-100. They put up that mediocre record in a pretty exciting fashion, as they were a fun team for fantasy given some of the young players and that ballpark. Their team .675 OPS was fifth-worst in the league, and their team 4.86 ERA was third-worst. Lots to work on here, but still - plenty to talk about for 2023. Let’s get into it.
Pitchers
Nick Lodolo
The Reds have two young pitchers that will be drafted in your league next year, and they’re both pretty interesting/exciting in my view. I’ll start with Lodolo, the 24-year-old who did this in the Majors in his first go at it
19 GS, 103.2 IP, 3.66 ERA, 1.25 WHIP, 29.7% K%, 8.8% BB%
31.2% CSW%, 13.7% SwStr%, 45.6% GB%, 9.1% Brl%
His arsenal:
New feature that we’ll see a lot moving forward. I made a file of all the league’s pitches (pitcher + pitch name) and found their percentile for
Velocity
Effective velocity (which considers release extension)
Spin
Horizontal Movement
Vertical Movement
Extension
Here it is for Lodolo:
I don’t want to go overboard on this stuff, because pitch fx (as they formerly called it, not sure if they still use that terminology) is far from the most important predictor of success. I would rather focus on results rather than movement, but it’s good to see it all here.
What we see with Lodolo is that he’s a unique case. He is a super tall lefty that throws nearly side-arm, which makes his release point super unique and that makes the movements on his pitches unique as well. How many times can I say “unique” in this analysis?
He has two sweeping fastballs and a sweeping changeup - they all move a ton horizontally but not much vertically. Then he drops the curveball which has a huge vertical drop - probably a testament to his height.
I love pitchers with the four-seamer and the sinker, and he put up solid SwStr% on both - at least above the league average on both. And then he has the disgusting curveball, his best pitch with a 21.4% SwStr% and a 34.6% CSW%.
It’s a really, really great pitch mix and it gets me very excited for him. He uses all three of those good pitches pretty evenly, which is also good to see.
That’s a very ugly plot.
The best part of the season he had, in my opinion, was that he dropped his walk rate as he went on.
In 2021 he put up a great 5.2% BB% in AA and a 7.1% mark in AAA - so that’s a huge vote of confidence that we can believe in this guy as having a better-than-average walk rate moving forward.
So we have a young pitcher with a very unique delivery, three good pitches (two good pitches and one great one), and already a successful year in the Majors under his belt by the numbers we like to see the most.
It’s notable that he threw “just” 115 innings this year, which would probably put a ceiling of like 150-160 innings up for him next year - but that’s become less and less of a concern over the years as the days of the 200+ IP guy are behind us. The reason he missed time was due to a back injury - and we really hate to see pitchers with back injuries - especially extremely tall guys like this. It’s pretty likely that he’ll have some back issues moving forward in his career, so maybe that’s a reason to keep him down lower in the rankings - but I’m typically not the type to guess about injuries.
All that said, I love, love Lodolo for 2023 - won’t be surprised if I’m the highest on him “in the industry” - still hate saying that.
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