Big Red Pitching Machine

As I have probably mentioned on this blog before, the Red Sox are my favorite baseball team.  However, for almost as long as I have been following baseball regularly, I have also been a fan of the Cincinnati Reds.  Historically, the Reds have had some great teams and great players, but one area in which they have always lacked is pitching.

Perhaps most notably, no Reds pitcher has ever won the Cy Young Award.  However, Cincinnati ace Johnny Cueto has put together a spectacular season so far.  With a 17-6 record, a 2.48 ERA (both of which lead the NL) and 144 strikeouts, he is the frontrunner in the Cy Young Award race with just a month left to go.  Clayton Kershaw and R.A. Dickey are close contenders, but if Cueto can stay consistent and finish off the season well, he could very well be Cincinnati's long-awaited Cy Young Award winner.

In the meantime though, here are a few interesting facts to highlight the plight of Cincinnati's pitching:

• Of the 16 "original" non-expansion MLB teams, only the Reds and the Red Sox have never had a pitcher win 200 games in his career with the team.  The Reds leader, Eppa Rixey, has 179, which is 13 fewer than Red Sox co-leaders Cy Young and Roger Clemens.
• There are 11 Hall of Famers who pitched for the Reds (one of whom was a first baseman who pitched 4 innings).  Of those, only two, Eppa Rixey and Tom Seaver, played more than one season in Cincinnati.
• Eppa Rixey is the only Hall of Fame pitcher to pitch the majority of his innings with the Reds.  Even then, he was hardly a first ballot Hall of Famer; his reaction when he heard that he was elected kind of sums it up: "They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren't they?" 
• In 1900, the Reds traded a young minor league pitcher for aging future Hall of Famer Amos Rusie.  Rusie would go on to pitch just three games for the Reds, and never played in the majors again.  But hey, it's not like they traded Christy Mathewson for him or anything.  Oh wait...
• Reds pitchers have received Cy Young Award votes a total of 27 times in 56 seasons.  They have finished in the top three just six times.
• During their World Series winning years of 1975-76, only one Reds pitcher received any Cy Young Award votes each season, Don Gullett and Rawly Eastwick respectively, and each finished a distant fifth.
• The most recent Reds second-place finisher was Pete Schourek in 1995, who had the misfortune of having a career year the same year that Greg Maddux finished with the fifth best ERA+ in baseball history.
• Since 1995, the only Reds pitcher to receive any Cy Young Award votes was Bronson Arroyo, who finished 12th in 2010.