Reds to promote top pitching prospect, will debut Friday

The Reds are promoting pitching prospect Rhett Lowder, per C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic on X. The young righty will start for Cincinnati on Friday, making his major league debut. The club must open spots on active and 40-man rosters to make space for Lowder.

Lowder, now 22, stood out during his time at Wake Forest. In his final year with the Demon Deacons, he tossed 120 1/3 innings, allowing 1.87 earned runs per nine. He struck out 38.6% of batters faced while giving out walks just 6.5% of the time. He was one of the top-ranked players in the 2023 draft, and the Reds took him seventh overall, the second pitcher taken after the Pirates took Paul Skenes with the first overall pick, with Lowder eventually signing and receiving a $5.7M bonus.

The young righty didn’t make his professional debut last year, but he was still considered one of the top 100 prospects in the sport based on his college numbers and draft pedigree. In 2024, the Reds started him off at High-A, but his time there proved short. In five starts, he tossed 25 1/3 innings with a 2.49 ERA, 28.4% strikeout rate, 5.9% walk rate and 49.2% ground ball rate.

That got him bumped to Double-A, where he made 16 starts with a 4.31 ERA but better peripherals. He had a 23.8% strikeout rate, 5.6% walk rate and 50.9% ground ball rate. If it weren’t for a fairly high .333 batting average on balls in play, he would have fared better, which is why his 3.33 FIP was almost a full run better than his ERA.

Lowder got bumped to Triple-A and made one good start there, tossing six shutout innings last Thursday. Though Lowder’s numbers have continued to impress, he may not have been promoted to the majors if it weren’t for the club getting devastated by injuries. In August, the Reds lost Andrew Abbott, Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo and Christian Roa to the injured list.

Losing a bunch of arms like that would be a challenge for any club, but the Reds already had guys like Graham Ashcraft and Brandon Williamson on the IL. Also, they have a doubleheader on Friday and just started a stretch of playing eight games in seven days. The current rotation mix involves rookie Julian Aguiar and swingmen who have been bumped into starting roles, such as Nick Martinez, Carson Spiers and Junis.

Perhaps this will just be a spot start to help the club navigate this challenging patch of the schedule. Even if Lowder stays a bit longer than one outing, the Reds will surely be keeping his rookie status intact one way or another. The club is now nine games out of a playoff spot and doesn’t have a strong chance of cracking the postseason.

Lowder is already a consensus top prospect in the sport. Baseball America currently has him in the No. 38 slot overall. FanGraphs has him at No. 73, MLB Pipeline at No. 35 and ESPN at No. 55. Assuming the Reds don’t let him toss 50 innings this year, he’ll still be a rookie going into 2025 and will likely still be on those lists in some form.

That will allow the Reds to potentially take advantage of the prospect promotion incentive. To combat service time manipulation, the collective bargaining agreement awards draft picks to clubs if certain conditions are met. If the player is on two of three top 100 lists at BA, MLB Pipeline and ESPN with less than 60 days of service time and then is promoted early enough in a season to get a full year of service, he can earn his club an extra draft pick just after the first round by either winning Rookie of the Year or finishing in the top three in MVP or Cy Young voting during his pre-arbitration years.

The Reds don’t have much left to play for in 2024, so they will probably look to keep that PPI incentive on the table. But they can give Lowder a taste of big league life as they trudge through this portion of the schedule. Though the club is currently in rough shape due to all those health concerns, fans can dream of a future rotation consisting of Lowder, Greene, Abbott, Lodolo and others going forward, as no one in that group is slated for free agency until after 2027.