Fantastic: The Reds have two All-Stars and have gotten MVP votes for the first time…..
Emilio Pagan held opponents to a.553 OPS throughout 69.1 excellent innings for the Minnesota Twins in 2023, with to a heater that averaged 95.8 mph and a small HR/FB percentage of just 5.3%. If ERA and FIP are more important to you when evaluating relievers, his 2.99 ERA and 3.27 FIP back that up.
It was good enough to earn him a two-year, $16 million contract with the possibility of bonuses, according to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal – with the Cincinnati Reds writing the checks.
The Reds bullpen struggles were well documented last year. Despite a respectable-enough 4.11 ERA (16th overall among relief units), their underlying numbers were quite concerning. Their 4.21 BB/9 was 6th worst, 4.48 ERA 8th worst, and 4.87 xFIP was tied for 2nd worst with only Oakland higher.
Their 8.51 collective K/9 was also the 4th lowest in the game, all things that were seemingly masked by a .280 BABIP that was 4th lowest. They were a cobbled together unit of players who’d been DFA’d before (by the Reds, even!) and who came in on minor league deals in search of roster spots, with Lucas Sims and Alexis Diaz just about the lone pair who really looked like they ‘should’ have been there from the start of the season.
In Pagan, they’ll get a guy who has had a somewhat up and down career but has at least a track record of producing the way he did in 2023 at other times. During the 2019 season with Tampa, he pitched to a stellar 190 ERA+ in an even 70.0 IP, his 2.31 ERA and 0.829 WHIP career bests, to date.
That led to the third trade of his career as he was sent to San Diego as part of the swap that landed Manuel Margo in Tampa, one year after he’d been part of a massive three-team deal between Texas, Oakland, and the Rays. Prior to the start of the 2022 season he landed in Minnesota as part of the deal that sent Chris Paddack to the Twins in exchange for reliever Taylor Rogers.
While primarily a fastball/slider pitcher for most of his career, he developed a splitter once he landed with the Twins, and it will be interesting to see what the Reds brass attempts to do with his offerings now that he’s already on the 6th team of his career. Perhaps the splitter was partly implemented to counter his rather extreme fly-ball tendencies – his 51.1% fly-ball rate in 2023 ranked as the 10th highest among the 273 big leaguers who logged at least 60 IP (Lucas Sims, at a crazy 61.2%, ranked 1st).
If he can simply channel what he channeled during the 2023 season, however, the Reds will have a very valuable back-end piece for their bullpen again, finally.
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Diamond Sports Group may drop Reds from regional channel
The Cincinnati Reds could be the next MLB team to switch broadcast networks.
The Cincinnati Business Reporter’s Steve Watkins reported on Tuesday that Bally Sports Ohio, the Diamond Sports Group regional network, may abandon the team after meeting its contractual duties for the 2024 season.
As has been widely documented throughout the year, DSG is currently embroiled in bankruptcy procedures dating back to March, when it filed for Chapter 11. Despite the fact that the troubled operator had hammered out a contract with its NBA teams and planned to have one in place for the NHL, MLB has done everything possible to distance itself from DSG after it struggled to pay numerous teams.
During the regular season, the league took over broadcasting for the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres after contracts with their respective Bally Sports networks were terminated.
An interesting note from Watkins are the financials of Bally Sports Ohio, which have come up against the challenges of cord cutting.
Watkins added that the network, which broadcasts games for the Reds, the Cleveland Cavaliers and Columbus Blue Jackets, lost $17.7 million through the first nine months of 2023.
Several teams were concerned about the viability of their channels prior to the start of the season, with the St. Louis Cardinals admitting to their concerns over player salaries in January. The Reds, who recently got out of Joey Votto’s huge contract in the offseason, are clearly wary of any more dips in revenue and could look for ways to shore up their finances through competing networks like Scripps, a media conglomerate based in the Queen City.
After an absolutely dreadful 2022 where the team lost 100 games, the Reds turned misery to moderate success on the field in 2023 with a team that flirted with a wild-card berth until late September. The future looks a little brighter with Elly De La Cruz on the field, but the plight of Bally Sports is still providing murky skies for the Reds.
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