2024 Starting Rotation - Is It Good Enough?

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(08-16-2023, 02:29 PM)ochocincos Wrote: The rotation next year is looking to be (not necessarily in this order):
Hunter Greene
Graham Ashcraft
Andrew Abbott
Nick Lodolo
Brandon Williamson

Connor Phillips in the wings.

Is the current batch of pitchers good enough that the Reds don't need to try to bring in a good SP to round out their rotation?
Could they instead look to just boost their bullpen and maybe one more good, reliable hitter?

That's a lot of meh.

Hunter Greene: Career 99 OPS+
Graham Ashcraft: Career 93 OPS+
Andrew Abbott: Career 155 OPS+ (dropping quickly because of hitting the rookie wall, but still legit)
Nick Lodolo: Career 103 OPS+
Brandon Williamson: Career 103 OPS+

Connor Phillips: WHIP over 1.500 in AA and AAA

Abbott seems like he could be a guy, but other than him you have a bunch of #4/#5 types. You need at least 3 guys who you can look at and say "yes, I can put those three into a postseason series and have a good chance to win". They have 1 in Abbott, and the rest of them would be that 4th guy who you have in your postseason rotation mostly to give the other 3 guys the extra day of rest while hopefully keeping you in the game.

Plus the fact is they're probably going to need to have a 6 man rotation in 2024 because of workloads....

Greene has never thrown 135 innings in a season before.
Ashcraft is currently at a career high 134 innings right now.
Abbott absolutely hit a wall a couple starts ago and his ~140 innings pitched this year is by far his career high.
Lodolo threw a career high 116 innings last year and just 41.2 innings this year.
Williamson is at a career high 121.2 innings this year.

Even if we assume all of them stay healthy (big assumption) and only average 5 innings per start (would be a huge letdown) that's still 810 innings over 162 games, divided by 5 starters is 160 innings per pitcher. Obviously some napkin math, but even only expecting just 5 innings per start would crush a lot of these guys career highs. If we look at 6 innings per start instead it's a little over 194 innings each. So somewhere between 160-194, which would likely be an unreasonable increase in workload from one year to another. If you are expecting/hoping for a deep postseason run, that will add another 20-30 innings for 4 of them that they need to still be capable of being good for.

They need a 6th guy in the rotation to eat innings, and also one of those 4 non-Abbott guys needs to be replaced with someone proven legit so that we're only relying on 1 guy out of the pool of 4 to become a 15-20% above league average starter next year rather than 2 out of 4 which would be an unreasonable expectation.