His complete game mastery of Cleveland on Tuesday night vaulted him into pretty elite company.
The term ‘ace’ gets lobbed around pretty easily in baseball parlance, and it never truly gets defined very well.
Does each of the 30 MLB clubs have an ace?
Are there five aces across the entire league? Ten? Seventeen?
Can you be an ace one year, not the next, and later recover your acedom?
Do the stats on the back of your baseball card dictate whether you’ve been an ace, or is an ace the kind of pitcher you put on the mound expecting future ace-like production?
There’s undoubtedly a certain bit of answer to each of these questions that needs to be rolled in to any discussion of a true ‘ace,’ but it’s hard to keep having that discussion at this point of 2025 without including Cincinnati Reds lefty Andrew Abbott’s name.
That’s even more true after his absolute gem against the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday evening, a night on which he fired a 3-hit complete game shutout of his Ohio rivals to lead the Reds to their fifth consecutive win overall.
Despite having missed the first two weeks of the 2025 season as he worked his way back from shoulder problems, the former 2nd round pick now sits fourth in the National League with 2.7 bWAR on the season. Dating back to the start of the 2023 season, he has accrued 8.8 bWAR in total, a mark that ranks him twelfth in all of baseball – directly behind the likes of Sonny Gray (8.9), Corbin Burnes (9.0), and Hunter Greene (9.1) and ahead of Blake Snell (8.4) and Nathan Eovaldi (7.7).
FanGraphs has yet to jump fully on the Abbott Wagon, though the lefty’s 1.87 ERA ranks 6th among the 100 MLB starters who’ve logged at least 60 IP so far this year – right ahead of Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes and his 1.88 mark.
Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images
Has Abbott pitched his name all the way into bona fide ace status? I don’t think he’s quite there yet. But when you start finding your name listed alongside the likes of Greene, Burnes, Skenes, & Co., it’s hard not wonder if it’s happening right before our eyes.
For his incredible efforts for the Reds against the Guardians on June 10th, Abbott earns this week’s Joe Nuxhall Memorial Honorary Star of the Week award, something he may well have to move off his trophy shelf for bigger and better prizes as they come down the road.
Congrats, Andrew.