The Reds are banking on a pile of second-year players. How’s that gone in the past?
It’s Opening Day tomorrow (for at least a few of the 2023 Reds).
The devastating injury to Matt McLain paired with the 80-game suspension of Noelvi Marte means that Jonathan India, once mired in a trade-block odyssey, will almost certainly feature prominently in the middle infield of the Cincinnati Reds in 2024. The former 2021 National League Rookie of the Year has had quite the bumpy road since those days, however, with multiple hamstring and foot injuries derailing his once-stellar form.
A guy who had a breakout rookie campaign struggling to replicate that form? Surely that wouldn’t be a problem for the 2024 Reds, right?
I mean to be no harbinger of doom here today. McLain’s injury, TJ Friedl’s injury, Edwin Arroyo’s injury, and Marte’s suspension should’ve done that to you already if something ever was. All I’m looking at today is whether the idea that the Cincinnati Reds, who are banking on continued excellence (if not extreme improvement) from their 2023 crop of rookies in 2024, can be viewed as a plausible one based on the recent performance of some of their other once highly-touted rookies.
Take Hunter Greene, for instance. The former #2 overall pick and 103 mph fastball slinger has long been the toast of the system, and he finally got the chance to make his debut in 2022 after a lost season to COVID and a major elbow surgery. In said rookie year he posted a solid-ish 4.44 ERA across 24 starts, with a 3.42 K/BB and 1.21 WHIP along the way. He watched his FIP drop a bit from 4.37 to 4.25 from 2022 to 2023, as did his HR/FB rate (16.1% to 14.3%), but in the process a) battled hip issues that landed him on the 60-day IL, b) watched his ERA spike from 4.44 to 4.80, and c) saw his K/BB dip from 3.42 to just 3.17.
Hardly falling off a cliff there, but not at all a step forward.
Pivoting to Nick Lodolo needs perilously little statistical analysis, as his rock-solid 2022 debut was marred early and often by a disastrous 2023 season that saw him try to pitch through, over, and around a tibia issue for 7 awful starts, barely showing any semblance of the guy who finished 6th in the 2022 NL Rookie of the Year voting.
India, who has tallied just 3.4 bWAR in the pair of seasons since his 4.1 bWAR rookie campaign, can serve as the next reference point, this time as a position player since the Reds have Elly De La Cruz, Marte, maybe McLain (if he ever gets healthy), Spencer Steer, and Will Benson rolling into their second seasons. Maybe some, if not all of those guys can un-mimic India’s progression and, instead, follow the path of TJ Friedl, who actually bucks the trend-narrative I started pushing with this piece and developed quite promisingly in 2023 - the third MLB season in which he’d appeared.
See, there’s still promise...even though the outlier here took a developmental path different than the one on which I’m highlighting!
Graham Ashcraft! His 4.21 FIP from his rookie year spiked to 5.06 last year, though to be fair his ERA+ improved from 89 to 96. A push, perhaps?
Alexis Díaz! His ERA rose from 1.84 to 3.07, his FIP jumped from 3.32 to 3.52, and his K/BB dipped from 2.52 to 2.39. His WHIP jumped from a sparkly 0.96 to a more realistic 1.19. Still good across the board, of course, but hardly the same as when he broke onto the stage as a Cincinnati Reds rookie.
The players in whom the Reds are trusting to improve from rookie to sophomore are different players, obviously. Are they at different levels of development, though? Or, as we’ve seen with the other promising fleet of players summoned to the bigs on the front-end of this emergence from rebuilding, just as susceptible to the league’s adjustments as their year-older peers?
I’d ask a little less of this if Friedl, McLain, Marte, and Arroyo were all around to help contribute to the mix a bit more. The though all winter was that they would be around, as would veterans like Jeimer Candelario, Nick Martinez, and Frankie Montas in case some sophomore slumpage would inevitably emerge. The depth! The depth was built in! Surely enough players would pick up the pieces if, by chance, the second-year guys didn’t progress as planned.
Now, though, the injury/suspension bug has lopped-off a significant portion of that depth, and the ability to absorb players not stepping forward as quickly as hoped can’t exactly be stomached as easily as before. We’re firmly in the position of hoping that the Reds rookie class of 2023 can jump up in form a bit more rapidly than the last time we hoped for this all to come together.
The quest to find out begins today.