The lefty spun his best outing of the year.
Nick Lodolo entered play on Sunday having been good for the Cincinnati Reds so far in 2025 even if he hadn’t looked like the best vintage of his own self just yet.
His fastball velocity has ticked down a full mph from 2024, and he’d relied on it about 12.5% less often this year. Instead, he’d upped his off-speed usage, throwing his slider almost 7% more often and his change-up an additional 7%, too. The end results had been quite good, as he entered play in Denver on Sunday with a 2.79 ERA through 5 starts, but he’d been striking out significanly fewer batters – just 5.6 per 9 IP after averaging 10.7 per 9 IP entering the season.
Sunday against the Colorado Rockies, however, we saw a Lodolo that looked like the vintage burgeoning ace he was before an injury-plagued 2024. The swing and miss stuff was back, the dominance of the strike zone returns, and the end result was his best start of the young season.
He even flirted with a no-hitter in the most offensive environment in all of baseball, keeping the Rockies sans hits until the Bottom of the 6th.
Lodolo fired 7.0 IP of 2 H, 0 ER, BB, 9 K ball in Sunday’s 8-1 win over Colorado, a win that secured a series sweep for the Reds and pushed them to 15-13 overall – a season best 2 games over the .500 mark.
It marked Cincinnati’s 4th straight victory and their 5th in their last 7 games, a surge that has them currently sitting behind only the Chicago Cubs in the National League Central division.
For his efforts, Lodolo takes home this week’s Joe Nuxhall Memorial Honorary Star of the Week award, a prize I can only assume he will cherish for the remainder of his days.