The Cincinnati Reds rookie Hunter Green has no beautiful way to sort out the statistics line in his first seven starts. But of all the ways to get a 1-6 record and a 6.21 ERA, with 44 strikeouts in 33.1 innings and 20 walks allowed, 11 homers allowed, the least eventful. And yet it doesn’t tell Green’s first-week story in a way that respects his weird, inconsistent beat. There’s no “good” way to distribute 11 homers as opposed to 67, but then there was a time when Green only allowed five at a start. Scouting Green’s figures suggest that he is a pitcher with thermonuclear staff and rock-and-flint commands, and that opposition hitters are leaning heavily against him, and that his team is probably not very good. But while this is true enough – in the case of the last bit, it is extremely and even historically true – it inevitably leaves much to be desired. After all, they are just numbers. There is no way to know just by looking at those big red numbers that Green Pittsburgh threw seven and a half hitless innings on the road against the Pirates and also took his sixth loss on Sunday.
The Reds have already drawn 1-20 this season, and the owner’s son has sparked an ongoing revolt by going to the team’s flagship radio station and taunting Reds fans before their home opener, it’s hard to say it’s important. A lot of Reds have been playing better lately, or at least often with pirates, but it’s hard to say that this is very important. The team has played 35 games and won nine; Nothing will be too important about this red season, at least this season. The Reds contain a special kind of refinement, an area of exception outside of the general forces conducting the game. In that sense, there is no limit to how many more no-hitters they can lose this season, and there is no real sense that this will be important.
It’s a deadly thing, but it’s a promising thing. Fans are trying to bring The War Home into the innocent possession of the party — a fan’s threat to lie on the bed of a pickup truck sitting on top of the Great American Ballpark Concourse did not work, but that fan will only have to be lucky once — maybe even threaten to sell one of them, which would be nice. More than that, though, young players like Green will be able to bring things up against Major League Baseball players in the Major League Baseball game, in a way that he almost certainly won’t do in Triple-A. In the baseball prospectus, Craig Goldstein sued Green for the Reds, treating the season as “a long case of spring training. Ignore the results and let him ‘work on some things’, be it pitch mix, pitch ratio, or just position on a given day.” The speed and quality slider makes Triple-A even less likely to offer significant disadvantages, and that’s exactly the disadvantage it has to adapt to and become its own version. “
And in that star-crossed no-hitter, there were some signs that Green might be doing it. Green throws a fastball that is faster than any other starting pitcher in the league and his Reds teammate Hunter Strickland is more straightforward than anyone on this side. The former is impressive in the way that triple-digit fastball can be seen in CGI; The latter explains why the MLB Heaters made an amazing .908 slug against it at the start of the Green against the Pirates on Sunday. It’s fast enough, as Goldstein notes, to blow even the hitters in the triple; It is, as such .908 slugging percent (not OPS, but slugging percent) Suggests, not enough to blow up the big ligers.
But Green’s slider has been as effective as his fastball ineffective, and Green’s pitch mix in recent games suggests that he’s working to completely flip the usage pattern he has now come up with on a larger scale. In his first start of the season, Green picked up a win against defending champions Braves despite allowing a pair of homers in five innings; He throws his fastball 60 percent of the time and his slider 25 percent of the time. On Sunday, 55 percent of Green’s pitch was slider and 43 percent fastball. In true junkie no-heater fashion, Green was actually able to dominate without particularly good pitching; He made five walks, needed 118 effortful pitches to cross the seventh and third, and kept things so messy that his team was able to lose even when those runners scored in a double-play ground that should have been t. They’re still Reds, and he’s still Hunter Green. This season’s experience will look for signs that they are changing. It should be easy enough to identify all the Reds baseballs around any positive hints — anything positive, really.
The absence of a strong third pitch may be a problem, but it’s one that Green is going to spend this season in practice – either figuring out what it is, or how to effectively pitch without it. After the start of Sunday, manager David Bell said, “He built on the good things and learned from the things that were difficult.” “It’s really impressive.” It even works for the former second-overall pick, including the fastest fastball in the game. There’s no reason to expect this process to be pretty, as playing Major League Baseball is incredibly difficult, and significantly harder when you’re doing it for the 2022 Cincinnati Reds. But in a season that is already pretty well lost, it’s worth watching — a talented young pitcher trying to figure out how to do something very difficult, in real time, in a real game, in the hope that something significant can happen. The rest of the Reds games will be played and turn it into a game that is important somewhere down the line. Just because it doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean it’s nothing.