On Saturday there was an article posted on ESPN that left just about every Cincinnati Reds fan, and plenty of non-Reds fans a bit confused. The article itself was about gambling, so take that for what it’s worth. But the author of the Reds-related section was Derek Carty and in his writeup he said something that was about as silly as it gets, “This pitching staff nearly cracks the bottom five projected staffs in baseball.”
He was speaking as the staff as a whole, not the rotation – though he questioned Andrew Abbott being all that good, calling him one of the luckiest pitchers in baseball, didn’t like how Nick Lodolo’s stuff looked when he came back from injury in 2025, and thinks that Chase Burns represents a significant injury risk.
After being hassled, called out, questioned, and all of those kinds of things online, he backtracked slightly. He claims that he misread the data and that the rotation is a top five one, but thinks the bullpen is below-average. Despite the realization, it took more than 16 hours before the blurb on the Reds was changed.
But while the rest of you can go pile on the guy if you want to, I think the general idea of “the Reds pitchers aren’t as good as they performed last year” is worth some discussion.
There’s this thing about a lot of people who like to talk about advanced stats….. they don’t understand what they are saying. They are simply repeating things they’ve heard others tell them are “good” or “right”, but they and probably the people who told them about that don’t actually understand what’s behind all of it.
25 years ago we first started getting a belief that pitchers didn’t have all that much control over what happened once a batter made contact. For the most part, when a better put a ball in play that was able to be fielded, it went for a hit about 30% of the time. Historically speaking, that tracked for a lot of pitchers. The difference between the good, bad, and ugly was things like allowing less contact (strikeouts), not walking guys (fewer baserunners), and how often you gave up home runs (balls that can’t be fielded). That’s BABIP, essentially.
But even when that theory first hit the baseball world, the person who noted it was sure to point out that for knuckleballers this theory didn’t hold up. Even then we had some understanding that some pitchers actually could have a larger amount of “control” on the outcomes with their contact. Groundballs go for hits more than fly balls, but they rarely go for extra-base hits. Fly balls are hits less often, but they are extra-base hits frequently. It’s a trade off and one type isn’t necessarily better than the other.But then there’s pop ups/infield flies. Those are turned into outs almost as often as strikeouts. And there’s a funny thing about infield flies – pitchers tend to be able to repeat how often they get them. Guys who get a lot one year tend to keep that going. The same goes for guys who don’t get a lot of them.
As we’ve been able to gather more and more data when it comes to pitch types and what happens when players make contact on those pitches we’ve learned that even generic pitch types have different types of BABIP. A guy who throws a lot of cutters is probably going to have a lower BABIP than a guy who throws a lot of sinkers. The reason is that the cutter has a BABIP that’s 18 points lower than the sinker does. Likewise, guys who throw a slider instead of a curveball would, on average, get a 15 point lower BABIP on their breaking ball.
How a pitcher’s arsenal looks can play a fairly big role in BABIP, but projection systems want to push 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 see anyone as true outliers in either direction.
But it’s not just about pitch types in a guys arsenal, either. We know today things we didn’t know 10 years ago. Pitch shapes matter. The arm angle matters (I mean, we knew this but we couldn’t quite define it like we can now). Some guys hide the ball better than others (we also have always known this, but couldn’t quantify it as well). And then there’s also the fact that defenses are better today than ever before thanks to just how much data we have at our fingertips and how we can have a much better understanding of positioning guys far more precisely based on how hitters are likely to react to the guy on the mound.
Every single thing is much better at giving the advantage to contact and hit prevention. The pitchers have advantages today that they’ve never had in the past. BABIP has dropped around the league by 10 points in the last decade. League average used to be .300. It’s down to .290 today. There are fewer groundballs, too, going from 45.3% in 2015 to 41.8% last year and it’s dropped nearly every year over that time period.
Essentially, all of that is me basically saying that while hitters do still tend to have more control over what happens on contact than pitchers do, some pitchers can and do have more control over their BABIP than the “league average”. While there are some guys who probably do get lucky, or unlucky, and are unable to repeat that, some guys can. And some guys can more than others, too.
Let’s take a guy like Hunter Greene for example. He’s thrown 100+ innings in four seasons in a row. In year one his BABIP was .281. The next year it was .339. The last two years it’s been .237 and .245. No projection system has his BABIP remotely close to where it’s been the last two seasons, with ZiPS being the only one under the .274 mark (.265). On one hand you can point to the sample size being small and say it’s just needing more time to “normalize/correct itself”.
But we also know that in the last two years Hunter Greene is a different pitcher than he was the first two years. He scrapped his change up and replaced it with a splitter. His fastball in 2022 and 2023 had similar movement, but things changed in 2024 and remained the same in 2025. The pitch now rises an additional inch and it’s got a little more cutting action to it. In 2022 and 2023 hitters hit .257 and slugged .503 against his fastball when an at-bat ends with a fastball. The fastball in the last two seasons has seen them hit .188 and slug .294 when an at-bat ends with a fastball.
Has he been lucky? Or has been been able to change how his fastball moves that has led to hitters being able to do less with it when they do make contact because it doesn’t quite end up where they expect it to?
Andrew Abbott, like Greene, has also been able to have much better than league average BABIP in his career. As a rookie in 2023 it was .302. But in the two seasons since then it’s been .260 and .274. In 2025 his walk rate really fell and so did his home run rate, which is what made him an All-Star. Nick Lodolo and Brady Singer both had better than average BABIP numbers in 2025, too, with Singer’s being below the .300 mark for the first time in his career in a season in which he threw at least 70 innings.
When a projection system is built to push everything close to the middle than to the ends, a team – and in particular a rotation – that pitched like the Reds starters in 2025 did is going to “take a step backwards”. And a lot of that is going to be what the system considers BABIP “correction”. But even if some of that does wind up happening, there’s a pretty big difference between “the Reds aren’t likely to be among the very best pitching staffs in baseball like they were in 2025” and “the pitching staff is in the bottom five in baseball.” Something like that should have set off some alarm bells for the writer if they had done an ounce of research before pressing a button in excel and started writing about it.
We’ll all have to sit back and watch how the 2026 season plays out. Maybe the Reds won’t have a starting rotation who all post better than league average BABIP numbers this season. Perhaps they will. Maybe they improve in other areas to counter if. Or maybe they don’t. That’s why the game is played. Projections are a guide. They aren’t a law. Not everyone fits into the same box. Not everything works on a linear line in the same direction. Sometimes the breaks do go for you or against you. Let’s check back in nine months and see how it all played out.
