The Cincinnati Reds are 60-56 this morning after back to back losses, the first coming at the hands of the Chicago Cubs in a series the Reds had already claimed and the latter coming at the hands of future Cy Young winner Paul Skenes.
That’s hardly a slide, or anything. That’s just how the ebbs and flows of most baseball seasons go for teams with tangible aspirations.
This Reds team has those aspirations, at least to some extent. They hired Terry Francona last offseason. They didn’t become ‘sellers’ at last week’s trade deadline, even if some of the moves they did make reeked of merely adding along the tight financial margins. They have built things in a painfully slow fashion, and legitimately look as if they’ve formed a core that could be right in the mix of it this year and beyond.
Is that alone a success to you? Is simply being still relevant enough to put on the television in August good enough? For all the promise and dedication to this club, they still aren’t even in a playoff spot – they sit 3.5 games back of the New York Mets and San Diego Padres for the final Wild Card spot in a format where seven National League teams make the postseason.
It’s hard for me not to view this season through the lens of 2023, the first ‘breakout’ year the Reds had with their retooled roster after the purge and rebuild of 2021-2022. They were 10 games over .500, in 1st place in the NL Central at the end of July, and sat far too idle at the trade deadline only to watch the season peter out with no playoff bid. That season featured incredible highlights and fantastic emergences, yet still culminated in the Reds not being able to claim they were even one of the 14 best MLB franchises of the season.
A playoff game this year feels paramount. This team getting over that hump and finally back into the postseason in a full-season for the first time since Chase Burns was 10 years old. For 2025 to go down in my own history book as anything other than another disappointment, the Reds need to make the playoffs.
Not doing so would become another stain on a front office that, in my opinion, has gone far too long with total autonomy and absolutely zero penalty for underachievement. The 3B situation (and the money they’ve thrown around trying to solve it) might cost us a chance to see Elly De La Cruz in the postseason in a Reds uniform, something we’re only going to have even a chance to see perhaps four more times. Not being able to find a slugger of any sort to buttress a lineup that clearly needs it already sticks out like a sore thumb, a crime that could end up costing a year of the core’s otherwise optimistic emergence.
What say you? What do these Reds need to pull off across the final 46 games of this regular season for it to go down as a ‘success’ in your mind?