To Avoid Bullpen Overexposure, The Cincinnati Reds Should Trust Their Starters More

Starting the season at their home at the Great American Ball Park, as is the usual custom, there was a shred of hope around the Cincinnati Reds heading into the 2023 MLB season.

In 2022, a giant offseason sell-off of talent and serious cost-cutting endeavours left the big league club with a slightly better farm system, but also a dearth of immediate talent. A hodgepodge of still-untraded veterans, third-tier prospects and recently-released players from other franchises looking to stay in the show, made for a team that accurately reflected the tear-down nature of its construction.

It is hard for a fanbase to get too excited about the prospect of watching a team comprised mostly of players that they know will not be there for longer than a few months. Yet it quickly got worse.

After a 2-2 start, the wheels well and truly fell off. Cincinnati lost 20 of its next 21 games, often by sizeable margins, on their way to losing 100 on the season. The team build to go nowhere had trouble even getting that far. Intrigue, then, could only go up from there.

But go up, it has done.

The passage of time, plus the returning yields in all those trades, has seen some MLB-ready prospects join the 2023 roster, alongside some selective spending in the offseason that shored up sizeable positional holes on the field (and also added what might potentially be retradeable vets such as Wil Myers and Curt Casali). The fresh faces, small steps forward and clean slates, alongside a clearer understanding of the direction and timeframe of it all, has made for a slightly better immediate outlook, and a distinctly better longer-term one. Fans will root for a team that tries.

At the centre of this renewed optimism lies this year’s slated starting rotation. Whereas the Reds of last year gave a combined 50 starts to Mike Minor, Robert Duggar, T.J. Zeuch, Justin Dunn, Vladimir Gutierrez, Chase Anderson and Reiver Sanmartín, they now feature to be running out a rotation with a front three of Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft. All three are 25 or younger, and while injuries to Dunn and offseason signing Luke Weaver have left the back end of the rotation an open question for now, the pencilled-in replacements of Connor Overton and Luis Cessa were solid enough last season to not be too worried.

As opposed to last year’s top-of-the-rotation duo of Tyler Mahle and Luis Castillo – both quality players that were expected to be, and quite rightly were, traded during the season – the new younger trio should stay as Reds for the foreseeable future. They are all good prospects, too; Greene throws the hardest of hard cheese, Ashcraft is not far behind him, and Lodolo struck out 11.4 batters per nine innings across his 19 starts last season on his way to a 3.83 ERA. All five starters in the projected Reds rotation, and the front three in particular, have shown themselves to be good major league players.

It is after that that things become less clear.

Last year’s Reds bullpen was amongst the worst in baseball. They gave up a collective 4.72 ERA, the third-worst mark in all of Major League Baseball, on the third-worst WHIP (1.42) via the joint-most walks (296). Unnervingly, though, while some of the guilty parties from that ineffective 2022 relief core have moved on, almost all of the bullpen that the Reds have opened 2023 with were a part of that crop.

Among the slated relievers for the Reds this year – Sanmartín, Fernando Cruz, Buck Farmer, Ian Gibaut, Joel Kuhnel, Derek Law, Alex Young and Alexis Diaz – only Young is new to the team this season. The rest constituted the best of what could be fashioned from the constant chopping and changing of the dishevelled 2022 campaign, and, unlike the batting line-up, no external additions were forthcoming.

By and large, that line-up represents, with respect, a compilation of misfits, journeyman and late bloomers. To name but two, the 33-year-old Cruz is a repurposed minor league catcher whose 14 appearances for the Reds last season mark his only big league time to date, while the 29-year-old Gibaut had passed through four different franchises in the previous three years.

All are here on some merit. Sanmartín’s overall bad numbers from 2022 belie how much more effective he became when moved into a relief role, and after his own slow start, Farmer became one of the more reliable bullpen arms in the second half of last season. Diaz, brother of Edwin, was an excellent late-inning guy when healthy, and although he has been passed around a lot, Gibaut’s consistently high strikeout rates speak to the quality he could still yet tap into.

Nonetheless, it is a fragile line-up, with only Diaz having a body of quality late-inning work to his name. Even then, he is still only entering his second season. Perhaps, then, the best way to mask this fragility is to make more use of the starters than manager David Bell might want to do.

On opening night, a full Great American Ball Park saw Greene dish out his quality stuff…briefly. Despite striking out five through the first two innings, Greene lasted only four more outs before being pulled after 3.1 innings; the bullpen allowed both of the inherited runners Greene left on base to score, making his line for the night a rather unflattering one of three runs, five hits and three walks given up.

A small amount of fourth-inning trouble, though, surely need not have been a reason to turn away from the young prospect. Indeed, perhaps these are the very type of situations he could use some real game situations to best learn how to handle. If the Reds had a sure-fire deep bullpen and a meaningful lead to protect, that would be one thing – however, given that they clearly do not have that, and that the purpose of these two otherwise-lost seasons is to position the franchise for a better future, it surely follows that a big part of that process is to give the young core pieces the opportunities to progress.

The loyal fans suffered through last season. The onus is therefore on the coaching staff to make progress. Turning over the game in the fourth to a weak bullpen on opening night does not seem like progress.