Hunter Greene Locks Himself Into the Reds’ Rebuilding Effort

Hunter Greene left his most recent start after taking a comebacker off his right shin, but the 23-year-old righty appears set to stick around Cincinnati for awhile. Per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the fireballer agreed to a six-year, $53 million extension (2023-28) with a seventh-year club option. Remarkably, amid the Reds’ teardown, this deal makes him the roster’s first player with a guaranteed salary for next season.

Via MLB Trade Rumors, this is the second-largest extension for a pitcher with between one and two years of service time, after Spencer Strider’s six-year, $75 million deal with the Braves. Strider sold high, so to speak, signing that contract coming off a 202-strikeout, 1.83-FIP season in which he was runner-up to teammate Michael Harris II in the NL Rookie of the Year voting. Greene, who’s less of a finished product, didn’t have quite that kind of platform.

Chosen with the second pick of the 2017 draft out of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California — at a point when he was still a two-way player — Greene quickly shifted his focus to pitching and found early success in the minors. He earned a spot in the 2018 Futures Game, but not long afterwards sprained his UCL and lost a season and a half to Tommy John surgery. When he debuted in the majors on April 10, 2022, he had just 186 minor league innings under his belt, which is to say that he was still rather raw. Particularly considering he was on a team that lost 100 games, and that he was hit hard early in the year, he acquitted himself well, posting a 4.44 ERA and 4.37 FIP in 125.2 innings.

At times, Greene was dazzling. Via Baseball Savant, he reached triple digits on 337 fastballs, the majors’ second-highest total; no other pitcher threw more than 92 such pitches as a starter. He topped out at 102.6 mph, averaged 98.9 mph on his four-seamer, the highest of any starter, and set some velocity records early in the season:

Hunter Greene pitch-tracking era records tonight:

– 100 mph pitches in game (39)
– 101 mph pitches by SP in game (13)
– 101 mph K’s by SP in game (2, tied w/deGrom + Verlander)

— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) April 17, 2022

Greene surpassed all of those records in his September 17 start, throwing 47 pitches of at least 100 mph, and 33 of at least 101, eight of which were the coup de grâce on a strikeout.

Overall, Greene’s 30.9% strikeout rate ranked seventh among starting pitchers with at least 100 innings, and his 21.8% strikeout-walk differential was 15th among the same group. On May 15, in just his seventh major league start, he threw seven hitless innings against the Pirates, but he walked five, was charged with a run, and wasn’t credited for a official combined no-hitter because he and reliever Art Warren only totaled eight innings.

Along the way, Greene did take his lumps, serving up 1.72 homers per nine, the third-highest rate among the 124 starters with at least 100 innings. His 9.4% barrel rate placed in the 16th percentile, and his 89.7 mph average exit velo in the 18th. Even so, his 4.00 xERA suggested that he pitched better than his ERA and FIP indicated.

The arc of Greene’s 2022 season reinfoced the age-old lesson that man cannot live by fastball alone. Greene’s heater got hit hard, particularly in the early going:

Bear in mind that the sample is rather frontloaded, in that Greene threw 74 innings from April through June but just 51.2 the rest of the way; he missed about seven weeks due to a shoulder strain, limiting him to one outing in August and four in September.

Justin Choi compared the 6-foot-5 Greene’s fastball to that of the 6-foot Strider, noting the latter’s better extension and vertical movement. Ben Clemens checked in on Greene’s pitch mix and found him at a point when he was increasing his slider usage early in counts and overall. That proved somewhat transient, but long story short, his results improved. While the heater got hit for a .514 SLG overall, his slider was exceptional, holding hitters to a .177 AVG and .307 SLG. Both pitches scored 132 via Stuff+, ranking in the majors’ top five among pitchers with at least 100 innings. Even with a changeup that scored just 71, Greene’s overall Stuff+ score of 129 ranked third behind only Strider (134) and Gerrit Cole (130).

Thus far this season, Greene’s starts have been uneven. The best of them was his 10-strikeout, zero-walk, six-inning performance against the Braves on April 12, though he did allow three runs. That’s the only time in four turns he’s lasted at least five innings, though he threw three shutout innings against the Rays on Sunday before departing; he took Yandy Díaz’s 97-mph grounder off his right shin with one out in the third and stuck around to complete the frame before getting pulled. X-rays were negative, and manager David Bell has already announced he’ll make his next start, albeit with an extra day of rest in between.

All told, Greene has posted a 4.24 ERA and 2.49 FIP, doing so against four teams (Pirates, Braves, Rays, and Phillies) that have combined for a .662 winning percentage. He’s struck out 30.8% of hitters and walked just 7.7%, down from last year’s 9%; meanwhile his barrel rate is down to 6.4% and his xERA to 3.59. It’s a small sample, but one that suggests he’s heading in the right direction, though he’s barely thrown his changeup — his much-needed third pitch — doing so just 2.3% of the time, down from 5.4% last year.

Though he’s not yet a star, Greene is very clearly a player worth keeping around and including as part of a rebuilding effort whose foundation is based upon young pitching, with 25-year-olds Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft also key pieces. The Reds have completely gutted their roster to the point that the only players who aren’t in their pre-arb or arbitration years are on one-year contracts (some with options) or, in the case of Joey Votto, the final guaranteed year of a long-term deal. It isn’t pretty what they’ve done considering that they were a playoff team in 2020, and ownership has certainly done its best to alienate the team’s fans in the process. Monday’s opener against the Rays drew just 7,375 paying fans, the lowest attendance in Great American Ball Park’s 20-year history, and the team’s average attendance of 16,974 is 25th in the majors so far, down 883 per game from a comparable point last year.

Greene’s deal is the Reds’ first real commitment to the next phase of their rebuilding, and he’s embraced that. Via The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans, from Wednesday’s press conference:

“I really just want to be at the forefront of it all,” Greene. said. “To be a good piece along with a lot of other pieces that are part of the team and part of the organization. I’m just one of many.”

“It’s easy to look at the stadium and say ‘there are no fans, I’ll wait and go (elsewhere),’” Greene told The Athletic. “But if I can look back and know that I was part of bringing fans back into the stadium, filling the seats, bringing that back to the city, that’s awesome. For me, that’s the main reason why.”

Via Dan Szymborski, here’s a look at the pitcher’s ZiPS projection for his six guaranteed years (including this one) and his option year:

Factoring in the steep pre-arb and arbitration year discounts, ZiPS projects a $57.2 million contract for the six covered years and an option year salary of $24.2 million; if he were a free agent, the numbers would come in at six years and $149 million or seven and $173 million.

Those two massive figures and the very one-sided tilt of the game’s pre-free agency salary structure aside (other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?), the extension doesn’t look out of line from the projections. By signing this early, Greene protects himself from the possibility of another significant injury; a second Tommy John surgery, for example, could be devastating. As for the actual breakdown, here are the annual salaries via MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand:

Here’s the breakdown of Hunter Greene’s extension, per source:

$2 million signing bonus
2023: $1 million
2024: $3 million
2025: $6 million
2026: $8 million
2027: $15 million
2028: $16 million
2029: $21 million club option; $2 million buyout

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) April 18, 2023

That signing bonus and $1 million salary gives Greene a bump from the $730,000 for which he originally signed for 2023. The $6 million, $8 million, and $15 million salaries cover what would have been his three arbitration-eligible years, and the $16 million buys out his first year of free agency. That year is clearly undervalued (figure it’s worth around $27 million), but the overall structure of the contract mostly makes up for it in the years before.

Via Feinsand, Greene’s 2028 and ’29 salaries can increase via escalators; he can add another $500,000 for each time he finishes sixth through 10th in the Cy Young voting, $750,000 for each fourth or fifth-place finish, $1 million for each second- or third-place finish, and $2 million for winning the award. He also adds another $200,000 for each All-Star selection, and can earn as-yet-unspecified annual bonuses for placing within the top five in Cy Young and MVP voting, making the All-Star team, winning a Gold Glove, and winning LCS and World Series MVP awards.

This is a sensible deal for both sides given the level of risk that comes with being a young, hard-throwing pitcher. Could Greene have secured a larger payday by waiting? Absolutely, but he made the choice to sign at a point where he hasn’t fully tapped his potential yet, and one imagines that his past arm injuries weren’t entirely out of mind. This is a clear step forward, but we’ll see where both he and the Reds go from here.