Is there reason to worry?
Nick Lodolo resurrected his wipeout slider from the injured list on Monday, using it to devastate the St. Louis Cardinals lineup for 5.1 IP in his first start in 16 days. It was the latest in a string of excellent outings from the Cincinnati Reds pitching staff, backing up Hunter Greene’s rock solid 6.0 IP on Saturday and the bullpen – and big offseason acquisition Nick Martinez – frollicked as the Reds swept the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday.
As of Tuesday morning, the entirety of the Cincinnati pitching staff has been valued at 6.8 fWAR, meaning only three teams in all of baseball (Philadelphia, Boston, and Kansas City) have a more valuable overall staff, to date. It’s a combination effort, too – Cincinnati’s starting pitching unit ranks tied for 9th with 4.6 fWAR, their relief unit 4th best with 2.2 fWAR.
The Reds sunk money into their revamped bullpen in a big, big way, with Martinez, Brent Suter, Buck Farmer, and Emilio Pagan. While there have obviously been bumps along the way with some of those players in particular, the overall unit has begun to play its part brilliantly. On the starter front, the Reds brought in Frankie Montas to boost an emerging young core, and that emerging young core is emerging, man.
Still, there’s one thing that has begun to befuddle me about how these Reds pitchers are getting their work done.
Once again, the tiny Great American Ball Park ranks as the single most homer-friendly in the game, per Baseball Savant’s park factors. That’s a title it has held in every single season since 2020, and I’m almost certain if I had the time to go back and check beyond 2020 I’d find that it led almost every single year in its existence. It’s a tiny park, fly balls fly well there, and more often than anywhere else you’d expect fly balls to turn into front-row homers.
Here’s where I squint and scratch my head. Cincinnati’s bullpen owns a league-worst 35.0% fly ball rate, a full 2.8% lower than Toronto in 29th. At 39.0%, the team’s starting unit ranks slightly better at 24th overall, but the combined pitching staff total of 37.5% ranks as the second lowest ahead of only Toronto (barely, as they sit at 37.2%).
Yet somehow, Cincinnati’s pitching staff owns a meager 9.5% HR/FB rate, and only 3 teams in all of baseball have a lower mark – including the Royals, whose home park has consistently rated as one of the hardest-to-homer parks since its inception in 1973.
It doesn’t even seem to be some early-season small sample noise, either. Last year, the Reds collective pitching staff owned the 2nd lowest grounder rate among all 30 MLB staffs at 38.7%, too. That, to me, suggests we’ve got a deliberate pattern on our hands, as the Reds have eschewed simply chasing induced grounders in lieu of weak enough contact in the air despite calling home the ballpark that should, in theory, punish fly balls allowed more than anywhere else.
Did I say deliberate pattern? A quick check at the relative pitch arsenals of the 30 MLB staffs in 2023 shows that nobody, and I mean nobody threw fastballs at a lesser rate than the Cincinnati Reds (43.2%). The rise in their use of the cutter – at 12.7% the 4th most among any team – may well have led to their reduced dependency on the classic heater, and while the revamped bullpen doesn’t lean into that secondary pitch as much in 2024, their 25.3% slider usage ranks 6th and their splitter usage (5.8%) ranks 5th.
As a result, the team’s overall 19.6% soft-contact rate induced, per FanGraphs, ranks as the highest in the game. Their 27.3% hard-contact rate similarly ranks as the lowest in the game. They have simply found a way to make teams swing wet noodles at balls they can still see clearly, and it’s getting them the absolute best possible results. It’s not even really a BABIP fluke, either, as their .282 mark sits just fractionally below the league-median mark of .284.
Is that the kind of thing that’s sustainable? Well, that obviously remains to be seen. What’s becoming more and more clear, though, is that this Reds club opted against leaning into groundball induction (and against putting elite defenders on the infield to support it) and instead has entrusted their pitching staff with the concept of letting balls fly high into the GABP sky on purpose, with the promise that it’ll actually pay off.
So far, so surprisingly good.