Starter Spotlight: Rea Day

5-1-2025 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X

It’s the first day of May and while panic is setting in as the season continues slipping away, there’s always another day and another game to try to win. 

In the matinee finale of the Cubs series today, the Bucs have a chance at a series victory with Paul Skenes on the bump and will face righty Colin Rea, who enters play today with a 0.96 ERA through his first 18.2 innings this season.

He faced the Pirates twice last year while with the Brewers losing both times, going 6 innings of 3-run ball in his first outing but getting lit up for 7 runs over 5 innings the second time they saw him.

Rea is off to a strong start with a career-high strikeout rate and a career-low walk rate as he works in the zone, hits edges and avoids hard contact.

Rea has a varied pitch mix but works off a primarily fastball-heavy arsenal, leaning on his low-90s 4-seam over 50% of the time, adding a slider and sweeper (both in low-80s) as well as a high-80s cutter when facing righties while preferring to throwing low-80s curve and high-80s splitter as his secondary offerings when facing lefty hitters.

Rea typically looks to locate the secondary pitches on the outer part of the plate, trying to force batters to reach and either roll over the ball or hit it weakly. 

Either way, hitters today will either need to look to pull fastballs up in the zone or try to go opposite field with off-speed/breaking stuff down and away.

His fastball has been hit hard (92.5 average EV) and has the highest xSLG of his offerings (.446) so that should be the main one for the Bucs to target today.

He looks to get ahead early with a 77.6% first pitch strike rate so they need to be ready early in counts to do damage and get May off to a hot start.