An even quicker look at the St. Louis Cardinals matchups against the Cincinnati Reds
The St. Louis Cardinals will host the Cincinnati Reds for their final matchup this season. The Reds fall just behind the Cardinals in the standings at 70-75 for fourth in the National League Central. As a team they rank 25th in baseball in wRC+ with 90. Their top player has been one of the more exciting players in Elly De La Cruz. This season Cruz has amassed over 6 fWAR with 121 wRC+ and 62 stolen bases and over 10% walk rate. The pitching is 23rd in the league in FIP at 4.22. The starters are led by Hunter Green, who is on the 15-day Injured List. In fact, most of their starters on the Injured List leaving just one probably listed in Rhett Lowder, their number 2 prospect in the system.
Here are the matchups that we know about:
There’s a reason to watch the Cincinnati Reds play baseball again tonight
While being aggressively promoted through the Cincinnati Reds system during the 2024 season, Rhett Lowder hit a wall. His opponents, for the first time in perhaps his entire baseball career, hit the heck out of him.
The 1st round pick of the Reds in 2023, Lowder reached AA Chattanooga in mid-May after beginning the year with A+ Dayton, and his first 10 starts there were rather abysmal. He yielded an .876 OPS to his opponents while surrendering 33 ER in just 43.1 IP, and less than one year removed from leading Wake Forest into the College World Series many began to wonder what the heck he was already doing at that level.
Between his final 5 starts with Chattanooga and his first – and only – start with AAA Louisville, Lowder was as polished and unflappable as any pitcher that’s come through the ranks of this franchise in the last few decades. He allowed just 2 ER over that 35.0 IP stretch, yielded just a .422 OPS against, and boasted a rock solid 34/7 K/BB in that time.
As it turns out, the Reds called up the latter guy, not the one who looked rushed and overmatched just a month and a half prior. Fortunately, the guy who breezed through what now looks like the final minor league stretch of his professional career has hit the ground running with the Reds, as he’s fresh off a scoreless 6.1 IP outing against the Houston Astros.
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For the record, he’s now allowed just 3 ER over his last 45.1 IP. That’s a 0.60 ERA dating back to July 20th.
As so many of the ‘future’ pieces of the current Reds franchise have either underperformed this year or fallen to the injury bug, so, too, have the Reds hopes tanked completely. The once-promising start to this year after 2023’s surprise breakout faded quickly, and the final couple weeks of the 2024 season now see many faces that won’t figure into the future playing in games that hold no value whatsoever. In Lowder, though, there’s at least a little bit of appointment viewing, though with 108.2 IP under his belt in his first pro season there’s a chance we might be running perilously close to him being shut down, too.
He’s on the mound to start tonight’s game against the Cardinals in St. Louis. His 2024 season has shown he’s got every chop necessary to own a place in the team’s Opening Day rotation in 2025, being pushed aggressively across four separate levels and getting better by every single day. Still, there might only be one, maybe two more outings of his between now and when the Reds start booking their tee times, so I suggest you give watching him a shot while he’s one of the precious few reasons to still tune in.
