If you focus purely on the meat & potato pitching statistics, it’s hard to suggest there’s been a Cincinnati Reds run of form better to begin one’s career than Rhett Lowder had at the end of 2024.

In 6 starts, he pitched to a tidy 1.17 ERA (381 ERA+), efforts that were good enough to be valued by Baseball Reference at 1.9 bWAR. A two-win pace across just 6 GS extrapolated across a typically healthy ~30 start season for a pitcher would be, well, extraordinary. All that in his first actual season of pitching as a professional.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of noise in all of the above statements.

Advertisement

For one, Lowder’s peripherals weren’t rosy at all despite the surface excellence. He managed just a 22/14 K/BB ratio during those 30.2 IP, pitched his way into (and out of) jams in most every outing, and leaned hard on his bullpen – Tony Santillan, in particular – to strand runners he’d left on-base. More importantly, though, is that we’re here at the end of the 2025 season and I’m talking only about the way he debuted at the end of 2024, since that’s unfortunately the most recent body of work we’ve got to go on with Lowder.

He’s been fighting injury for the duration of the 2025 season. Injuries, rather, with first a worrisome forearm injury and later a left oblique injury having derailed any chance of him proving that he could truly make it at the big league level in a larger sample, and as of this weekend he’d not appeared anywhere since 1.1 iffy innings with AAA Louisville in mid-May. But with the Reds pitching staff looking haggard and just under two weeks remaining for them to find a way to sneak into the playoffs, it’s hard not to get excited about Lowder making his return to the AAA mound with some decent results on Saturday.

Lowder threw 25 strikes among the 34 overall pitches he threw for the Bats across 2.0 IP, striking out a pair while walking none. He did allow a run on a pair of hits, but as the above video reveals he also had both his slider and change-up working – as well as his patented ability to locate both inside and away.

It’s awfully encouraging to see given how much time he missed due to both injuries, but the timing of it hopefully means he can sneak his way back onto the Reds roster for at least an appearance or two out of the bullpen before the season’s totally over. Heck, it may even be the case that he can make it back for a decent-leverage appearance in a game that actually means something should the Reds find a miracle run of form across their final four regular season series amid this farfetched playoff chase.

Advertisement

At worst, he has at least put himself back in a scenario where he’ll enter the offseason free from rehab and can build up to the 2026 season in normal fashion. That’ll be vital for him for the obvious reasons, but also because the Reds have (on paper) the kind of glut of starting pitching options that will make them the envy of the rest of baseball, and that envy is often the precise right time for a front office to strike and make some trades.

Seriously, the staff options heading into 2026 are pretty absurd: