Yes, Virginia, The Reds Have to Get an Ace

The constant offseason preoccupation for the Reds is, as our deposed leader “Chairman” Chad Dotson says, “hashbrown get the pitching.” (I am still feeling out ways to make fun of Doug, I’ll settle on something soon.) There are – as is widely acknowledged – a variety of ways to approach it, with some even suggesting that the Reds should move away form the traditional model and try openers and tandem pitchers or any variety of other options. The changing role of starting pitching in baseball got me wondering how feasible these ideas were, so I went looking at numbers.

(Note, I tend to view pitchers in groups of 30 or so, since there are 30 teams, so, for instance, the 30 best pitchers are all,…