I am not exaggerating when I say that Hunter Greene was one of the best pitchers in all of baseball in 2024 and will deservedly receive a lot of Cy Young Award votes in the National League.

This is not my campaign speech. The numbers are all there.

Greene has been rated at 5.4 bWAR so far this season, the highest of any NL pitcher (and trailing only Detroit’s Tarik Skubal’s 5.5, the MLB leader). FanGraphs isn’t quite as enthusiastic about Hunter, but his 3.7 fWAR is the eighth-highest of any pitcher this year.

He was the rock of the Cincinnati Reds’ rotation and seemed to get better with each outing. The problem is, it now looks like he won’t be on the mound anytime soon. Late Saturday, after the Reds were fresh off of a 13-1 thrashing by the Kansas City Royals, Cincinnati placed Greene on the 15-day injured list for “elbow soreness,” and the hiss that was felt was the collective groan of every disgruntled Reds fan worldwide.

Fifteen days is a good chunk of a season. As you may have noticed, the Reds have just 39 games left to sneak into the back row of the super-expanded mega-playoffs, and they’ll now be tasked with doing much of that heavy lifting without Greene. even if he returns on time.

Does anyone think the elbow pain that has sidelined him will go away quickly enough that he will be ready to face MLB hitters again in just 15 days?

This is a brutal blow for the Reds, who were equally brutal in this important weekend series against the Royals. They lost the first two games of the series, getting outscored 20-2 in the process. While they were on the verge of “getting back to .500” and feeling like “a playoff team,” they just as quickly plummeted back to the basement of their own mediocre division. They have to leapfrog 5 teams to get into playoff position, and win 5 games in the process, and now they have to do it without their best pitcher.

It’s grim out there again, Reds fans. At least you know what that feels like by now.