Projecting Reds Lefty Cody Reed

Collectively, Reds pitchers have been all sorts of terrible this year. Their team ERA (5.45) and FIP (5.62) are both easily the worst in baseball, as injuries to Homer Bailey, Raisel Iglesias and Michael Lorenzen have left their rotation painfully thin. It’s about to get better, though, as top prospect Cody Reed is set to make his big-league debut tomorrow. Since we’ve likely passed the Super Two deadline, he should be up for good.

Reed enjoyed a breakout season in 2015, when he posted an impressive 24% strikeout rate and 2.93 FIP between High-A and Double-A. That was enough to make him a fixture on prospect lists last winter. He placed in the middle third of most top 100 rankings.

Reed built on last year’s success at the Triple-A level this year. Although he’s faced better competition, his strikeout and walk rates have remained on par with last year’s numbers. The end result has been a 3.20 ERA and 3.37 FIP. Not bad at all for a 23-year-old facing borderline big-league hitters.

Reed’s excellent numbers, along with his 6-foot-5 frame, make him one of KATOH’s favorite pitchers. My system was enamored by Reed’s 2015 performance, and loves him even more now that he’s proven himself at Triple-A. His projected 3.8 WAR over the next six seasons put him 86th overall, and 15th among pitchers. Adding his 2016 numbers to the mix, his projection ticks up to 5.3 WAR, making him one of the most promising pitching prospects in baseball right now.

To put some faces to Reed’s statistical profile, let’s go ahead and generate some statistical comps for the tall lefty. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis Distance between Reed’s 2016 season and every Triple-A season since 1991 in which a pitcher recorded at least 350 batters faced. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. In generating Reed’s comps, I only considered pitchers who cracked Baseball America’s top-100 list either before or after the season in question. This is intended to act as a proxy for “good stuff,” which Reed certainly has. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues.

Reed isn’t quite an elite pitching prospect: His minor-league numbers don’t jump off the page, like Julio Urias‘ or Jameson Taillon’s did. But Reed has pitched very well in the high minors at a young age, which makes him a very good bet to succeed in the show as well — especially considering he has lights-out stuff to back up the numbers. This has been a rough year for Reds fans, but things should only get better with Reed in the picture. He looks like he could be a difference-maker over the next few years.