Visitors to Great American Ball Park on Tuesday night were greeted with a barrage of baseballs in the stands. Unfortunately, none of them were socked by the Cincinnati Reds. Instead, the Reds themselves offered up six homers to the visiting Washington Nationals in a 10-4 drubbing that once again served as a reminder to just how disheveled the current state of the pitching staff truly is.
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Starter Brady Singer was on the hook for a trio of those homers, all of which came after he took a hard comebacker off his foot/ankle. He only yielded 3 of the 10 total runs on the night, though, as the latter 7 all came with Reds relievers on the mound.
That’s been the tale of the last few weeks, unfortunately – a beleaguered bullpen tasked with picking up lots of innings after short starts that simply can’t keep runners of the bases, or runs from crossing home plate.
Here’s just a sample of where the Reds bullpen ranks in Major League Baseball relative to its 29 other peers:
ERA: 4.70 (25th out of 30)
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FIP: 5.04 (29th)
xERA: 5.36 (30th, with 29th at 4.78)
xFIP: 4.93 (29th)
WHIP: 1.57 (28th)
SIERA: 4.51 (29th)
BB/9: 5.92 (30th)
HR/9: 1.22 (t-28th)
vFA: 93.0 mph (27th)
Oppo%: 20.5% (29th)
GB%: 36.7% (28th, or 3rd lowest)
FB%: 42.3% (28th, or 3rd highest)
Barrel%: 11.1% (30th)
Launch Angle (LA): 16.8 degrees (3rd highest)
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The top few metrics show you the ends here. As you work your way down the list of places where the Reds bullpen ranks last, or close to it, you stumble face first into the means to the ends.
The Reds are walking more batters than anyone else, while also allowing opponents to barrel balls more than anyone else. The balls that are hit are hit with one of the highest launch angles in the game – good for the batter, bad for the Reds. The Reds are also extremely fly-ball prone (while playing in the worst possible ball park for that to be a trait), and opposing batters are turning on them more (read: pulling the ball) than almost any club in the sport.
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Cincinnati’s also throwing it up there slower than their collective bullpen has for most of the last handful of years, even when they sported soft-tossing Brent Suter down there.
Some of this would be fine if, say, they were sporting an elite K/9. Serving up the occasional dinger is OK if there’s nobody on base and you’re fanning just about everyone else. However, the bullpen sports just a 9.07 K/9 (12th overall) that’s too middling to make up for the copious walks and frequency of having balls squared up against them, too.
The frustrating part is that you can’t even simply pin this on their closer being hurt, nor can you bank on this improving drastically the moment he’s inserted back into the mix. Emilio Pagan was a big, big part in all of this (though far from the only one), and the in-house replacements don’t necessarily figure to be instant improvements if given the chance, either.
So, how the Reds go about fixing this remains to be seen. For now, all we know is that how it’s been simply can’t keep being status quo if this club has any expectations of October baseball.
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