While the Cincinnati Reds didn’t have an official game scheduled for Saturday, there was a “B game” scheduled on the backfields. There were some big league veteran pitchers set to pitch for both Cincinnati and Cleveland. On the Reds side both Wade Miley and Tyler Mahle threw, while Cleveland sent out Cy Young Award winner Shane Bieber. There are no stats from the game available, but we know at least one thing that happened: Catching prospect Mark Kolozsvary went deep against Shane Bieber. And the Reds made the video available to the media since the field was cut off to non-employees.
Last season the Reds invited Mark Kolozsvary to be a part of their 60-man player pool and he spent the year at Prasco Park. That was a big step up in competition where many of the guys he was facing were at least Triple-A caliber pitchers, with more than a few being big league caliber guys. While that certainly doesn’t prepare you so much for facing a guy like Shane Bieber, it probably didn’t hurt, either.
David Bell on Vladimir Gutierrez
Earlier this week manager David Bell was asked what he thought about Vladimir Gutierrez and he was quite complimentary.
“He looks outstanding,” said Bell. “He’s always fun to watch. It looks like he’s gotten better. He’s still highly on our radar, hopefully soon. He just need to keep pitching and keep developing, but he looks great.”
This spring we’ve seen two appearances from Gutierrez with the big league club. The 25-year-old was charged with an unearned run in one of his outings and tossed a shutout inning in the other, picking up two strikeouts between his two 1-inning appearances.
After not pitching in the 2020 year after being suspended after testing positive for stanozolol in spring training, Vladimir Gutierrez went to the Dominican Republic for the second consecutive season to pitch in the winter league for Licey. He made five starts, throwing 17.0 innings while walking just five batters with 21 strikeouts and posting a 3.71 ERA.