Cincinnati Reds Elly De La Cruz on two wins in row over New York Mets
Cincinnati Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz doubled in a run and scored during Reds’ 3-2 win over the New York Mets Sept. 7.
The Reds had a new hall of fame-caliber manager in Terry Francona and high expectations beginning the season, but face longshot odds of making the postseason.The Reds managed to squander quality pitching performances with an inconsistent offense and spotty defense.All-Star starting pitcher Hunter Greene was pitched like an All-Star again, but missed half the season,
The Cincinnati Reds have been sick but not tired, manager Terry Francona said. At least no more than anyone else this time of year.
“Everybody at this point in the year is fatigued,” said Francona, who was one of several members of the team to miss at least one game this past week because of a flu-like bug going through the clubhouse.
Maybe that hard-hitting bug contributed to upending the Reds’ long homestand that promised a last chance to get back in the playoff race.
But what happened to the rest of the Reds’ season? What happened to the rest of that ugly back half of August that sent a Cincinnati team just a half-game from playoff position reeling all the way to that crushing splat of a ninth inning Sept. 5 that cost them a critical game against the New York Mets and effectively ended their longshot bid for a playoff berth?
What happened to all that urgency and promise that rushed through the door with the hiring of the Hall of Fame manager last fall? The aggressiveness of all those moves around the edges of the roster in the offseason that supposedly strengthened the floor of this year’s team with playoff veterans like Gavin Lux, Jose Trevino, Austin Hayes and Brady Singer?
Where did all that hope and hype for 2025 all go away? What went wrong – especially in that final two weeks leading into that Mets crusher.
“We can try to come up with an exotic answer if we want to,” playoff veteran closer Emilio Pagán said. “But the real simple way to explain the last three weeks is that we just haven’t been good enough, we haven’t executed consistently enough at a high level to be able to win the games that we should win, and need to win.”
How is that possible with all that starting pitching?
The Reds have as much frontline pitching and depth in the rotation as almost any team in the game – the rotation ranked second in MLB by Frangraphs.com.
How does a team with all that pitching land face down with a losing record on Sept. 5 and six games out of the National League playoff field?
Nobody in the clubhouse is making excuses. And they still plan to fight until the math officially says they’re done, they say.
Even the toughest two-month schedule in MLB to finish the season hasn’t been used an excuse – despite the $350-million teams they ran into every other series or so. If anything, it probably says more about the business they didn’t take care of early in the season when the schedule was relatively soft.
Maybe what went wrong starts even before that – when ownership kept its thumb on the pay scale during an offseason of urgency after hiring Francona, leaving the front office to make its flurry of moves around the edges, with a bottom-third payroll, instead of addressing the one, great, elephant-in-the-room need.
Alex Bregman anyone? Or Pete Alonso? Both veteran sluggers took short-term front-loaded contracts with opt-outs after this season — the kind of proposition that might have worked for a team with one of the lowest payrolls in the league and looking at maybe a three-year window with this core and its manager.
But the talent and execution difference hasn’t been the money, Pagán said.
“A lot of guys in this locker room are going to make that type of money some day,” he said. “We’re fortunate to have young guys that aren’t quite there yet. As far as talent level, at least in my opinion, there’s not a drastic dropoff from those teams to us.
“Where there is a pretty significant dropoff is experience,” he said. “That’s only going to continue to get better in this clubhouse.”
Until then, if you want to know what went wrong with Francona’s Reds this year, start here:
Reds fielding better, still not good enough
A spectacular weakness of the 2024 team, the Reds defense got center fielder TJ Friedl and second baseman Matt McLain back from lengthy injuries to upgrade the team fielding going into the season.
But Elly De La Cruz still makes too many errors at shortstop, and until getting Gold Glove third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes at the trade deadline, that position was a big problem for four months.
Even lately, the fielding has been a persistent drag on their efforts to win. During that 3-11 skid that took them to their Sept. 5 demise, they had a seven-game stretch against the Diamondbacks, Dodgers and Cardinals in which they committed 11 errors and gave up six unearned runs (not counting the free runner in extra inning games). They went 1-6 in those games.
Hayes is under club control through 2030, and Noelvi Marte looks like he could become a strong outfielder after moving from the infield to outfield cold in July.
But for now, they rank 21st in the majors in fielding metrics per Fangraphs.com, 12th in the National League — made worse by the fact that their four division rivals all rank among the top five in the league.
Not as bad as their 25th ranking last year. And they’ve moved from 28th to 20th in defensive runs saved.
But not nearly good enough for a team that expects to play in October.
Power-broke Cincinnati Reds lineup
The Reds are a firmly average offensive team in almost every way.
Except in the one important, glaring way that leaves them short of having a good enough lineup to support their championship-caliber starting pitching.
Only six teams, including just one projected playoff team (San Diego), hit fewer home runs than the Reds’ 138 through that Game 141 loss to the Mets – that included getting out-homered 11-2 by the playoff-minded Blue Jays and Mets in the four games through that one.
It’s been an issue since selling off Eugenio Suarez and the other veterans a few years ago and failing to backfill with this current youth movement (anybody hear from Christian Encarnacion-Strand lately?).
“The other night(s) we scored nine and nine (in back-to-back losses to the Jays). Theirs seemed a little easier,” Francona said. “They hit the ball a little further.
“Still scored a bunch of runs,” he added. “Your team is your team. You try to take their strengths and maximize them and take the weaknesses and minimize them. That’s what managing is. Sometimes we’re a little more successful than others.”
It’s no wonder the Reds lost three consecutive 1-0 games early in the season, tying an MLB record. Or that it took them seven tries to finally score an extra-inning run this season when given the free runner at second to start the inning.
In 13 extra-inning games this season, they’ve scored the free runner just five times in 17 extra frames, despite that being a roughly 50-50 expectation. They’re 3-10 in extra-inning games.
Asked what role power has in his lineup, Francona said, “I wish it had a bigger role. We are who we are. So you can complain about it or try to win. Our goal during the season is to win and make it reach, even if sometimes it doesn’t look like it might reach.
“When the season’s over, then you can look up and go, ‘OK, maybe here, here here.’ But not right now.”
Their biggest star, Elly De La Cruz, has struggled
De La Cruz is an above-average offensive player this season and earned a second All-Star selection.
But he has played through hamstring and quad injuries this season and dealt with a death in his close-knit family at the end of May, all without missing a game.
His stolen bases are down, and he has gone through extended power outages – including a current homer-less drought that extends back into July.
From his last home run, July 31, through the Sept. 5 season-breaker, De La Cruz was hitting just .216 with eight extra-base hits, a .563 OPS, six walks and 44 strikeouts in 140 plate appearances (31.4%).
That included a strikeout with one out and the bases loaded in that crushing ninth inning, without swinging at any of the five pitches he saw from Edwin Diaz.
Their best pitcher, Hunter Greene, missed half the season
The Reds’ Opening Day starter appeared well on his way to a second straight All-Star selection and was in the way-too-early Cy Young conversation when he walked off the mound May 7 in Atlanta with what an MRI determined was a Grade 1 groin strain.
He returned two weeks later but made only three more starts before landing on the IL again with recurring pain in the area.
The second stretch involved an aborted minor-league rehab assignment and multiple medical exams/opinions after the subsequent MRIs revealed no worsening of the injury. A workout program in Arizona and eventual rehab assignment meant 10 weeks without their 100-mph ace.
Strangely, the Reds managed a better record (39-33) in his absence, in part a testament to the Reds’ starting depth. But there’s no denying the hole it left at the top of the rotation.
Alex Bregman, Kyle Schwarber, Pete Alonso
They all play for other teams.