He spoke as the staff as a whole, not the rotation — though he questioned whether Andrew Abbott was all that good, called him one of the luckiest pitchers in baseball, didn’t like how Nick Lodolo’s stuff looked when he returned from injury in 2025, and thinks Chase Burns represents a significant injury risk.
After being harassed, called out, interrogated and all that stuff online, he kind of bounced back. He claims he misread the data and the rotation is top-five, but thinks the bullpen is below average. Despite the realization, it took more than 16 hours for the blurb on the Reds to be changed.
But while the rest of you can attack the guy if you want, I think the general idea of “the Reds pitchers aren’t as good as last year” is worth some discussion.
There’s something about a lot of people who like to talk about advanced statistics… they don’t understand what they’re saying. They simply repeat things that they have heard from others as being ‘right’ or ‘good’, but they and probably the people who told them about them do not actually understand what is behind it.
25 years ago, we first came to believe that pitchers didn’t have much control over what happened once a batter made contact. For the most part, when a better player put a ball in play that could be played, it was hit about 30% of the time. Historically, that was true for many pitchers. The difference between good, bad and ugly was things like allowing less contact (strikeouts), not letting guys walk (fewer base runners) and how often to give up home runs (balls that can’t be fielded). That’s essentially BABIP.
But even when that theory first reached the baseball world, the person who noticed it would be sure to point out that this theory didn’t hold water for knuckleball players. Even then, we had some understanding that some pitchers could actually have a greater degree of “control” over outcomes with their contact. Groundballs go for hits more than flyballs, but they rarely go for extra-base hits. Flyballs are hit less often, but they are often extra-base hits. It’s a trade-off and one type is not necessarily better than the other. But then there are also pop-ups/infield flies. Those turn into zeros almost as often as strikeouts. And there’s something funny about fly-ins: Pitchers tend to repeat how many times they get them. Guys who get a lot for a year tend to keep it up. The same goes for guys who don’t get much of it.
As we’ve been able to collect more and more data about pitch types and what happens when players make contact on those pitches, we’ve learned that even common pitch types have different types of BABIP. A guy who throws a lot of cutters will probably have a lower BABIP than a guy who throws a lot of sinkers. The reason is that the cutter has a BABIP that is 18 points lower than the sinker. Likewise, guys who throw a slider instead of a curveball would average a 15-point lower BABIP on their breaking ball.
What a pitcher’s arsenal looks like can play a pretty big role in BABIP, but projection systems want to get everyone closer to “league average.” While there are some guys who have lower BABIP projections and some higher than league average, the systems don’t consider anyone to be true outliers in any direction.
But it’s not just about pitch types in guys’ arsenal either. Today we know things that we didn’t know ten years ago. Pitch shapes are important. Arm angle is important (I mean, we knew this, but we couldn’t quite define it the way we can now). Some guys hide the ball better than others (we’ve always known this too, but couldn’t quantify it either). And then there’s also the fact that defenses today are better than they’ve ever been thanks to the amount of data we have at our fingertips and how we can get a much better understanding of guys’ positioning, much more accurately based on how hitters are likely to react to the man on the mound.
Everything is much better at giving the advantage of contact and hit prevention. The pitchers have advantages today that they never had in the past. BABIP has dropped 10 points in the league over the past decade. The league average used to be .300. Today it is only .290. There are also fewer groundballs, from 45.3% in 2015 to 41.8% last year, and this percentage has fallen almost every year in that period.
Essentially, what I’m saying in all of this is that while hitters still tend to have more control over what happens on contact than pitchers, some pitchers may have more control over their BABIP than the “league average.” While there are some guys who are probably lucky or unlucky and can’t repeat that, some guys can. And some boys can do that more than others.
Let’s take a guy like Hunter Greene for example. He has thrown more than 100 innings four seasons in a row. In year one, his BABIP was .281. The next year it was .339. The last two years it was .237 and .245. No projection system has his BABIP anywhere close to where it has been the past two seasons, with ZiPS being the only one under .274 (.265). On the one hand, you can point out that the sample size is small and say it just needs more time to “normalize/correct” itself.
But we also know that Hunter Greene has been a different pitcher over the last two years than he was the first two years. He eliminated his change and replaced it with a splitter. His fastball in 2022 and 2023 had similar motion, but things changed in 2024 and stayed the same in 2025. The pitch now goes an inch higher and has a little more cutting action. In 2022 and 2023, hitters batted .257 and hit .503 against his fastball when an at-bat ended with a fastball. The fastball over the past two seasons has seen them hit .188 and hit .294 when an at-bat ends with a fastball.
Was he lucky? Or has he been able to change the way his fastball moves, causing batters to do less with it when they do make contact because the ball doesn’t quite land where they expect?
Andrew Abbott, like Greene, has also been able to achieve much better BABIP than the league average in his career. As a rookie in 2023 it was .302. But in the two seasons since then it has been .260 and .274. In 2025, his walk rate really dropped and so did his home run rate, making him an All-Star. Nick Lodolo and Brady Singer also had better-than-average BABIP numbers in 2025, with Singer falling below .300 for the first time in his career in a season in which he pitched at least 70 innings.
When a projection system is built to push everything closer to the middle than the ends, a team — and especially a rotation — that threw like the Reds starters did in 2025 will “take a step back.” And a big part of that will be what the system considers BABIP “correction.” But even if some of that does end up happening, there’s a pretty big difference between “the Reds probably aren’t among the very best pitching staffs in baseball as they will be in 2025” and “the pitching staff is in the bottom five in baseball.” Something like that should have set off alarm bells for the writer if he had done a little research before pressing a button in Excel and writing about it.
We’ll all have to sit back and see how the 2026 season goes. Perhaps the Reds don’t have a starting rotation that all puts up better BABIP numbers than league average this season. Maybe. Maybe they’ll improve in other areas to counter this. Or maybe not. That’s why the game is played. Projections are a guide. They are not law. Not everyone fits into the same box. Not everything works on a linear line in the same direction. Sometimes the breaks are for you or against you. Let’s check back in nine months to see how it all went.
#turns #Reds #good #pitching #staff #Redleg #Nation