The Cincinnati bullpen isn’t ‘the’ problem, but it’s a problem

Are we still in the ‘small sample size’ portion of the MLB season? Perhaps.

Will we also see the Cincinnati Reds wrap up the first 1/4th of their 2025 season by this weekend? If the rain holds off, we will.

That’s long enough to begin to take stock in how parts of the team have performed thus far and begin to sort out whether that can be written off merely as noise or whether there’s something more concrete, or more sinister in the numbers.

That’s got me looking at the Cincinnati bullpen, a unit who saw its resident closer struggle terribly before being demoted to AAA and has been forced to lean on a converted starter with zero relief experience as one of their most high-leverage arms already.

Without delving into too much opinion or circumstantial evidence just yet, here’s a look at several key metrics from the bullpen so far and where those rank among their MLB peers:

• HR/9: 1.39 (29th overall)
• K/9: 7.48 (27th overall)
• GB%: 36.7% (28th overall)
• GB/FB: 0.78 (29th overall)
• FIP: 4.78 (29th overall)
• xFIP: 4.64 (29th overall)
• BABIP: .209 (30th overall)

Their collective ERA (3.60 through 122.2 IP) ranks a respectable 11th overall, which I think is why a lot of the other stuff up there may seemingly be masked at the moment. From a bottom line perspective, yes, they’ve kept runs off the board well enough to not be a five-alarm dumpster fire, but a whole lot of the underlying metrics seem to think that’s been way, way out of line given the expectations of what’s happened to the pitches they have thrown.

Their -1.19 E-F (the difference in their ERA and FIP, for the record) sits as the second most disparate in the game, for reference, which is the kind of thing that usually doesn’t get more kind as the next 120+ games of the season provide a larger sample. If anything, it’ll shrink with more luck evening the playing field, something their collective .209 BABIP suggests will work much more against them than for them.

Let me try to paint a picture of those highlighted numbers above. They aren’t missing bats the way you’d hope, as evidenced by their rank in strikeouts per 9 IP, and the balls that they are allowing in play are leaving the yard more often than all but one team. They also aren’t inducing grounders hardly at all, meaning they’re allowing more fly balls than almost any other team (while calling GABP home, where fly balls turn into homers perhaps more than anywhere else). That fly-ball proclivity will suppress their BABIP some – those turn into outs more often than grounders and liners – but that’s not exactly a good thing when you play in a home park where keeping the ball on the dirt is paramount.

Luis Mey and his 103 mph heater recently got called up when Alexis Díaz was demoted, and that will presumably help – he sure can’t be worse than Díaz was in his short time. Sam Moll will, in theory, make his way back into the LHP mix. Still, there don’t appear to be too many immediate ‘fixes’ available to the Reds in their minor league system who profile as ready-made big league bullpen arms at the moment, meaning they’re simply going to have to hope a lot of the guys down there right now just, like, pitch better.

That’s Tony Santillan, Taylor Rogers, and Scott Barlow. That’s pretty much everyone not named Mey or Graham Ashcraft, who have both looked grand in their admittedly limited work. That’s still true of assumed closer Emilio Pagán, who has done fairly admirable work despite allowing far too many homers (even though he’s been an extreme fly-ball pitcher for his entire career beforehand).

Pehaps it’s the juggled hierarchy that’s to blame so far. Maybe that’ll begin to sort itself out going forward. The worry, though, is that the back of these guys’ baseball cards don’t collectively scream lock-down relief corps, so I don’t know how much ebb there will be to the flow we’ve seen through the first 36 games of this season.

Stats courtesy of FanGraphs