#10: Superheroes with training wheels
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Hunter Greene, James Wood and Joe Boyle.
Hey it’s Hannah and one of the core tenets of the bandwagoning philosophy that underscores this endeavor is having My Guys. It’s a phenomenon that is both easy, unnecessary, and amorphous to explain: you know how there are certain players you learn something identifying about — or perhaps your own experience of baseball intersects with them — early on in their career in a way that endears them to you indefinitely. Maybe “endears” isn’t so much the right term. It’s more like the facts of them feel familiar, like knowing where a cousin went to college, perhaps. You experienced learning about them in a way that created a more lush syntactic web than simply File under: Baseball Players: Cincinnati Reds: Pitchers: Hunter Greene.
The coolest, scariest, best, messiest, most absurd thing I’ve done in my career was spend half a season in the broadcast booth for the Apple TV+ Friday night games. I don’t like to talk about it for a lot of reasons that I’m not going to talk about here. But one of our first games was Greene’s Great American Ballpark debut, just the third start of his career. He wasn’t an ace out of the gate, but at that point, he had made just a couple of high-profile starts — against the reigning champion Atlanta Braves and at Dodger Stadium the day after being a heavily featured part of Jackie Robinson day. In the second one, he set a record for most triple-digit pitches in a single game. Then, he struggled at home and his velo dipped and the team lost their 10th game in a row. I talked to him the next day for a piece about being famous from the time he was barely a teenager.
“Since I committed to college in eighth grade,” he said at the time. “So I've had the magnifying glass on me since I was 13 years old.”
What strikes me reading that back now is: I think Hunter Greene has gotten less famous since made the majors. He’s never thrown enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, for one thing. In his rookie and sophomore seasons, he ranked in the 60s and 70s for fWAR among pitchers with at least 100 innings. Last year, that jumped to 17th. He threw 150 1/3 innings, made the All-Star Game for the first time in his career, finished with a 2.75 ERA, and garnered down-ballot Cy Young votes.
Also he pitched for a Cincinnati Reds team that finished 16 games back in the NL Central. Also he plays in the NL Central. Ask me to name 10 major league pitchers and one of them would be Hunter Greene because I have memories of the beginning of his big league career that are more visceral than a screen. But since no one ever did that, even I haven’t thought about him very much.
He never stopped throwing gas, though. Across three seasons, he threw 472 pitches 100 mph or faster, the most of any starter, and 6.9% of his total arsenal. (By percentage of total pitches thrown, Jacob deGrom has the second-highest rate of triple-digits in that time at 6.3% — but only 98 total pitches). Curiously, 2024, which was his best season by results, was his slowest season for fastball velocity (averaged 97.6 mph).
Now, through an admittedly a small sample size in 2025, Greene is throwing harder than ever and throwing hard more than ever. And, thus far, it’s working spectacularly. He’s averaging 99.4 mph on his fastball, highest of his career and nearly two miles an hour over last year’s velocity. He’s thrown 59 pitches over 100 mph already, hitting triple digits 15.5% of the time. All other big league starters have thrown five pitches over 100 mph combined.
He’s got an ERA under 1.00. He’s working on a streak that’s currently at 18 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings. For now at least, he’s the most valuable pitcher in baseball according to FanGraphs. He almost threw a complete-game shutout last week, pulled with two outs in the ninth.
“If I’d have managed with my emotions, I’d have left Hunter in,” Red manager Terry Francona told reporters. “I wanted him to finish that game, I just thought he started to overthrow a little bit.”
He finished that game with 104 pitches; his 100th pitch of the night was 100.2 mph.
I would be remiss to not at least acknowledge the ticking-time-bomb-ness (Greene has already had one Tommy John surgery) of this kind of velocity uptick. But if his UCL can hang on through the season, we could be watching Hunter Greene’s ascendance into the conversation about best pitchers in the game. He won’t be My Guy anymore because he will have graduated to something else: Guy Everyone Knows Is Great.
And if you thought that was interesting, keep reading for Zach’s close look at a couple of players also doing an extreme thing to great success so far this season.
James Wood and the giant open space
by Zach Crizer
James Wood is 6-foot-7, 22 years old and belongs to a class of huge-but-nimble players who feel like they escaped from the NFL draft and landed in a ballpark. The Nationals outfielder, along with the Elly De La Cruzes of the world, can seem like the logical endpoint of jaw-dropping athleticism applied to baseball, but he’s also not at an endpoint. Just 94 games into his MLB career, Wood is deploying his talents mid-metamorphosis.
Especially in the small sample of early April, Wood’s incomplete mastery of his physical gifts can show up in some dramatic and revealing ways.
About 60% of all major-league balls in play travel more than 10 feet and less than 300 feet before hitting the ground. These would be “good swings at the batting cages” for a layman. They are familiar looking. The quintessential line drive over the second baseman but in front of the right fielder; the blooper over the shortstop; the double down the line. They’re not easy, nothing is in the major leagues, but they’re a well-trod path to success. The silent majority, in DC terminology, they represent the lion’s share of hits — about two-thirds most years, closer to 70% in recent seasons.
Wood is off to a strong start, batting .259/.385/.593, but he has barely touched that 10 foot to 300 foot range, logging just three hits via the usual route. Only 11 of his 33 batted balls have fallen in there, a league low 33% so far. In fact, he’s hit only one batted ball that cleared the infield on the fly without going 300+ feet. That means his spray chart looks sort like he’s playing a version of the game where the outfield is lava.
There’s a glaring inefficiency you don’t need me to explain: Wood does not pull enough fly balls to maximize his power output. So far in 2025, he arguably hasn’t pulled a single ball in the air, though Statcast’s definitions aren’t counting this dinger to right-center.
What he does do, though, puts his potential in stark relief. Because Wood is 6-foot-7 with muscles made of dangerously taut bungee cords, he can just rip laser home runs the other way. But even when he’s doing the frustrating thing where he hits entirely too many ground balls, Wood has the stupid “where did that baby deer get a jet pack?” type of speed that allows him to beat out choppers that pound the dirt two feet in front of home …
Or seemingly routine grounders …
Failing that, he can simply hit the ball so hard (in such a suboptimal fashion) that infielders can’t handle it anyway. This is Still Figuring It Out in one of its most mouth-watering forms. Wood is a quality major leaguer right now, and is a couple microscopic geometry problems from turning into a one-man highlight factory.
What if Superman breaks your window?
by Zach Crizer
Continuing an accidental theme today, the Tampa Bay Rays started Joe Boyle on Sunday afternoon. Donning rec specs, Boyle could play Clark Kent without costume or prosthetic assistance. The man is built like a brick shithouse — 6-foot-8, 250 pounds — and chucks his fastball 100 mph. The problem is he chucks it all over the place.
Boyle is 25 years old and still working on breaking into the majors. A reliever at Notre Dame, where coaches presumably prioritized the wellbeing of batters and bystanders over his ultimate potential, the Reds drafted Boyle and converted him to starting before flipping him to the A’s. They brought him to the bigs and gave him 13 starts (along with three relief appearances) before sending him to the Rays in the Jeffrey Springs deal this winter.
In every significant sample so far, Boyle has been capital-W Wild and capital-N Nasty. Across almost 300 innings in the minors, he has walked 7.3 batters per nine .. and struck out 13.7 per nine. He is perhaps the ultimate test case for a pitching philosophy popularized by the Rays that entails pumping up a pitcher’s stuff and advising him to just throw it down the middle (or try to).
On Sunday, Boyle made his Rays debut by … no-hitting the Braves for five innings. Showcasing the 100 mph heat, a diving slider and a low-90s splinker in the Paul Skenes mode, Boyle was particularly effective early before walking two and hitting a batter to prompt the end of his day. It was not a clinic in precision.
Boyle’s status in the majors is much more precarious than Wood’s. If he doesn’t iron out his weakness to some degree, any given time you see Boyle might be his last shot.
But Sunday’s spot start was a reminder of why teams think the way they do, why the project of turning Boyle into a starter is worthwhile: It’s easier to get Superman contacts than teach Average Joe to fly.
What we’re chatting about
A slapstick routine broke out in West Sacramento over the weekend as the A’s impromptu ballpark struggled to complete the basic task of getting an injured Mets player to the clubhouse. A golf cart ran out of gas on the field and staffers had to push it through the outfield gate. Spare a thought for the ballpark employees pushing that cart while the A’s both refuse to take their adoptive city’s name and plaster Las Vegas ads on the outfield wall. The situation owner John Fisher chose — and MLB enabled — is both totally embarrassing and better than he deserves. –ZC
No reason to not be honest now! I love that Luis Severino laid out exactly how his offseason went down, including the specific dollar figures on both sides. According to the man himself, when talking to the New York media on the occasion of the Mets being in Sacramento, he was very interested in staying with the Mets, even if that meant taking less money. He told his agent that he would re-sign with New York for two years and $40 million because “The trainers were unbelievable, everything there, it was good. So I was trying to sacrifice more money by staying in a place that I know…I can get better.” The Mets, however, were only willing to go as high as what they offered Frankie Montas — two years, $34 million. I respect the candor here and it provides useful context to take into considering future free agencies. –HK
Golf does nothing for me (hear it was a good time this weekend, though!) but there are 162 baseball games a year (per team!) and so I strongly support the broadcasters Doing A Bit that — crucially — entails continuing to relay the action on the field while having some fun. Consider this an official challenge, Tigers booth, in three weeks time I expect a partial inning called in the style of the Kentucky Derby. –HK
Really good stuff, y’all. We need the Apple TV tea, obviously… Joe Boyle had great control yesterday through about 3 innings. Just learned he was optioned back down. The Rays rotation has been very good so far (without McClanahan!!!)