Brady Singer Has Added the Secret Ingredient

The Cincinnati Reds have had a promising start to the 2025 season, which is at most a modest surprise considering how many talented young players the organization has stockpiled over the past several years. What is surprising is how much of that success is owed to the Reds’ rotation.

Coming out of the weekend, Cincinnati is 14th in position player WAR, 23rd in reliever WAR, and seventh in starting pitcher WAR. It’s not that any individual Reds pitcher has had a shocking month of April; it’s more that four of them — Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, and Brady Singer — have all gotten hot at the same time.

Greene was the no. 2 overall pick and one of the hardest-throwing starting pitchers ever — no mystery as to how he came to place himself among the early Cy Young contenders. I’ve also written in some detail about the unusual paths Abbott and Lodolo have taken to big league success.

But I’m surprised to see Singer doing so well. In November, the Reds acquired the right-hander from the Royals in exchange for Jonathan India, Singer’s college teammate. It was a big move for two clubs that usually reside in the bottom third of the payroll table, this swap of former first-round picks. Externally, it seemed less momentous; the Reds had developed too many infielders and too few pitchers, while the Royals had done the opposite. Singer and India were both getting expensive (India makes $7.05 million this year, Singer $8.75 million), and both will be free agents after next season. Each would be more useful in his new locale, and the league marches westward toward the Pareto frontier.

In his last three seasons in Kansas City, Singer was extremely durable (he hit the 150-inning mark all three years) but not especially imposing. He posted a 4.15 ERA and a 3.94 FIP over that stretch, with a strikeout rate of 21.7%. His tendency to allow HR/FB rates in the mid-teens raised some eyebrows, seeing as how the Reds play in the most homer-friendly stadium in the league.

It’s still very early in the year; I’ve been putting off planting a vegetable garden because the temperature is still dropping into the 40s at night where I live. Which is to say there’s plenty of time for Singer to regress. But heading into his scheduled start on Tuesday, he’s 4-0 in five starts, with a 3.62 ERA. That ERA is less than a tenth of a run better than what Singer posted last year, but it severely understates the improvement in his peripherals.

Singer’s ERA comes on a strand rate of 63.4%, which is nine percentage points below league average. His FIP is down some eight tenths of a run from last year, while his xERA has dropped by a run and two thirds. He’s running a career-high strikeout rate of 28.6%, which is a 6.3-percentage point improvement from 2024, and nearly a 10-point improvement from his rocky 2023 campaign. Singer is also allowing fewer home runs per nine innings while allowing more balls in the air than ever.

Last year, Singer had two above-average pitches: a low-90s sinker and a low-80s slider. Those two pitches accounted for 88.0% of his output to same-handed batters and, somewhat unusually for a starter, 77.0% of his output to lefties. Opponents posted a .329 wOBA against the sinker and a .286 wOBA against the slider, and Baseball Savant rated them as 10 and eight runs above average, respectively, over the course of the season.

Singer mixed in three other pitches at least 50 times over the course of 2024, and all of them got completely torched. If “League-Average Hitter vs. Brady Singer’s Four-Seamer” were a single person, he would’ve been third in the league in both SLG and wOBA. Changing teams is a great time to stop doing the thing that turned Joe Rando into Yordan Alvarez.

Last summer, Ben Clemens formalized a pet theory he’d been kicking around for months, if not years beforehand. I’d like to say it stuck with me because Ben is an incisive writer and a brilliant baseball mind, and he is, but I’ll be honest: If you want me to remember something, use a food metaphor.

The second solution is one I’m surprised no one landed on before: Add a cutter. When I cook, I have a secret: If something doesn’t taste right, I just hit it with a little acid. Since I’m a decent cook and also really annoyingly obsessed with baseball, I say I’m “sprinkling in a cutter” when I do it. Like acid in food, cutters seem like a magic ingredient. They bridge movement profiles and fix platoon deficiencies. If you don’t know what a taco needs, it’s probably lime. If you don’t know what a pitcher needs, it’s probably a cutter.

Mmm, tacos.

Anyway, no homework for the entire class tonight if anyone can guess what Singer is doing this year that he wasn’t doing in 2024.

There are a couple marginal factors that probably help. Singer’s working in the zone more and getting strike one on the board slightly more often. His sinker is moving a couple inches less horizontally and a couple inches more vertically, which helps disguise it against that slow and dead zone-y four-seamer.

But most of all, Singer is throwing a high-80s cutter about 12% of the time. If this cutter has any exceptional qualities, they’re not obvious to me. And when opponents have put it in play, they’ve made hard contact in an extremely, extremely limited sample.

Nevertheless, context matters here. Singer doesn’t throw that hard, and — unusually for a starter — he doesn’t have an off-speed pitch worth mentioning. Since the start of the 2024 season, 148 starting pitchers have thrown 100 or more innings in the majors. Singer is one of only nine who’s used offspeed pitches (changeups, splitters, forkballs, and screwballs) a combined 2% of the time or less. Four of the other eight (Tyler Glasnow, Nick Pivetta, Andre Pallante, and Dylan Cease) are high-arm slot guys who work in the vertical plane as fastball/breaking ball pitchers. Matt Waldron throws a damn knuckleball; he shouldn’t even be on this list. Bailey Falter is kind of a high-slot guy, but with all the goodwill in the world, he’s mostly a fringy big league starter.

That leaves Mitch Spence and Clarke Schmidt, both right-handed starters without elite velocity, just like Singer. You know what they have in common? They’re no. 2 and no. 3 in the league, respectively, in cutter usage.

So does Singer want to learn a cutter, or does he want to be the kind of pitcher you have to describe tactfully to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings? I think we have our answer.

This year, Singer is still mostly a sinker/slider guy, to both sides of the plate. But with a cutter in his arsenal, hitters can no longer sit on a breaking pitch when the ball comes out of Singer’s hand and immediately zoom over to his arm side. It’s just one more line in the scouting report to keep in mind, just a handful of additional milliseconds longer to identify the pitch. But pitchers who throw at Singer’s volume without elite velocity live and die in those margins.

Seeing as he’s only five starts into his cutter era, Singer has only thrown the pitch in meaningful action a few dozen times. As he continues to integrate it into his repertoire, he’ll learn more about how best to exploit it, and I imagine we’ll see it more and more. Neither Spence nor Schmidt is a perfect comparison for Singer, but both of them have basically dispensed with their four-seamers completely. If the cutter’s a success, it would not shock me if Singer did the same.