Reds lose Hunter Greene to injured list at make or break point of season

The ace of the Reds staff will be shut down for 15 days, at minimum.

There is no exaggeration in my voice when I say that Hunter Greene has been one of the best pitchers in all of baseball in 2024 and will, deservedly, get a lot of votes for the Cy Young Award in the National League.

This isn’t my stump speech. The numbers are all there.

Greene’s been valued at 5.4 bWAR so far this season, and that’s the most from any single NL pitcher (and behind only Detroit’s Tarik Skubal at 5.5 for the MLB lead). FanGraphs isn’t quite so high on Hunter, but his 3.7 fWAR sits tied for the 8th most of any pitcher in the game this year.

He’s been the rock of the Cincinnati Reds rotation, and he’s seemingly gotten better and better each time he’s taken the mound. Problem is, it now looks like he won’t be on the mound again any time soon. Late Saturday, after the Reds were busy getting pummelled by the Kansas City Royals to the tune of 13-1, Cincinnati placed Greene on the 15-day injured list with ‘elbow soreness,’ and that whoosh of air you felt was the collective groan from every exasperated Reds fan worldwide.

15 days is a good chunk of any season. The Reds, you may have noticed, have just 39 games left to try to sneak their way into the back-end of the superexpanded megaplayoffs, and they’ll now be tasked with doing a bulk of that heavy lifting without Greene even if he’s back exactly on schedule.

Anybody got any kind of expectation that the elbow soreness that was enough to shut him down will suddenly disappear quickly enough so that he’s ready to face MLB hitters again in just 15 days?

It’s a brutal blow to the Reds, who’ve been equally as brutal in this key weekend series against the Royals. They’ve dropped each of the first two games of the series and have been outscored 20-2 in the process. While they were on the cusp of ‘getting back to .500’ and feeling like ‘a playoff team,’ they’ve just as quickly taken a nose-dive back towards the basement of their own mediocre division. They need to jump 5 teams to be in playoff position, picking up 5 games in the process, and now they’ll have to do so without their best pitcher.

It’s once again bleak out there, Reds fans. At least you’re well aware of what that feels like by now.