Nate was joined by Jeff Trennepohl, host of Sports with Strawberry Ice, and Joe Farfsing, host of The Bengals Show to go hard in the paint on all things Reds related this week. Somehow, despite a lack of major news, they still had plenty to talk about. And had an absolute blast doing it!
They went deep into where the Reds’ bullpen fits in the NL Central and if it’s good enough to win the division and lead to a playoff run. As always, they wrapped things up with some particularly random Viewer Mail questions from our Patreon family.
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It’s a bit of a fool’s errand to predict what almost any major league reliever will produce in a given year, much less what any 8+ of them will produce. Yeah, sure, there are a handful of relievers who are fairly consistent, but they mostly ebb and flow without much reason or logic.
Take the Orioles. Felix Bautista was a 27-year-old rookie in 2022, and he pitched very well. Last season, he was probably the best reliever in baseball, with a 280 ERA+ and 16.2 SO/9 IP. Alas, Bautista shredded his elbow late in the season and is on the shelf until 2025, likely never to be as good as he was. Meanwhile, the Orioles traded their closer, Jorge Lopez, at the 2022 trade deadline, when Lopez had posted a 234 ERA+ in his first full year (at age 29) as a reliever. Lopez has pretty much been awful ever since.
The Reds bullpen might stink; it might be pretty good. Fangraphs might have a better idea of what to expect than, say, a random state legislator from Wyoming, but it won’t be much better.
Yep. This kind of prediction is especially a crapshoot at this point.