Reds 5 big questions ?

[Hoofhearted]

(10-03-2018, 07:42 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: I feel like we were saying this last off season though "Look at Mahle and Castillo! Not to mention Stephenson, Reed, Romano and Garrett! And Bailey will be back too! We have plenty of options. Almost too many!"

How long do we want to live in this limbo waiting for good players or average players to suddenly become great?

I don't have a good answer for that. I know we have three decent pitchers that can be apart of a good SP group: Castillo, Mahle, and to lesser extent Sal. So roughly half of your SP group for next run is in place, but like bengalsfan has said, we really don't have an ace. And really would like to have another good, young arm be apart of that, too. That leaves one big SP contract you can probably squeeze in there to help round it out. 

But they have one already with Homer. We don't know a) who's available on the FA market who wants to pitch for us, b)how much he will cost. Quick look at the available FA pitchers next year, there's some good names...but none of them linked to wanting to come play for us.


Patrick Corbin (29 years old, 5.7 WAR) - wants to be a yankee
Dallas Keuchel (31, 3.4) - probably stays with Astros
Clayton Kershaw (31, 3.2) -- Can opt out of the two years and $65 million remaining on his contract. - 

Charlie Morton (35, 2.9) - a middle aged pitcher? pass
David Price (33, 2.5) -- Can opt out of the four years and $127 million remaining on his contract. - why the f*ck would he do this?
J.A. Happ (36, 2.5) - he's like 40
CC Sabathia (38, 2.2) - he's like 50
Lance Lynn (32, 2.2)
Trevor Cahill (31, 2.1)
Derek Holland (32, 1.9)
Clay Buchholz (34, 1.7)
Anibal Sanchez (35, 1.6)
Nathan Eovaldi (29, 1.5) 
Gio Gonzalez (33, 1.4)
Hyun-Jin Ryu (32, 1.2)
Matt Harvey (30, 1.1) 
Jeremy Hellickson (32, 1.1)
Wade Miley (32, 1.0)
Garrett Richards (32, 1.0)
Tyson Ross (32, 1.0)
Brett Anderson (31, 0.8)
Edwin Jackson (35, 0.8)
Marco Estrada (35, 0.5)
Bartolo Colon (46, 0.2)
Jaime Garcia (32, 0.0)
Adam Wainwright (37, 0.0)
Drew Pomeranz (30, -0.3)
Miguel Gonzalez (35, -0.3)
Francisco Liriano (35, -0.4)
Chris Tillman (31, -0.4)
Hisashi Iwakuma (35, N/A) -- Hasn't appeared in the Majors in 2018.


So who on this list is your "ace" that takes this team to the next level? I don't see any of these pitchers taking this team from 66 to 90 wins (which is what they've been consistently good at achieving). I don't see it out there for what fits our window of a few years away. So next is trading, which is almost impossible to do really because I am not that up to beat with all the other teams needs. But I can only assume it would take a haul and a half to get a quality hurler. Something like Senzel/Green/Trammel involved. That depletes what looks like a pretty good offensive team they're building. They've really hurt themselves with developing quality pitchers. They need to focus on that first IMO