With their victory over the Chicago Cubs on Sunday, the Cincinnati Reds completed the 4-game sweep of their National League Central rivals and sent a shiver down the spine of the stumbling New York Mets.
The Reds, right now, are in playoff position. They’re tied with the New York Mets at 80-76 with 6 games remaining, yet the Reds own the tiebreaker over the Mets thanks to beating up on them more often than not during the 2025 regular season.
That, of course, means the ball is in their court. They control their own destiny – keep winning, and they’re in.
That will mean taking down the Pittsburgh Pirates, who come to town Tuesday for the final series in Great American Ball Park of the season. It may also mean needing to take down Paul Skenes, who seems in-line to take home the National League Cy Young Award should the Reds not score, say, 28 runs off him in his start against them on Wednesday.
Then, it’s off to Milwaukee to face the Brewers to finish the season, though there’s some hope that the Beers may be resting some of their key players (or at least their key bullpen arms) as they ramp up for a deep postseason run.
One team that’s not going to frontload their starters to make a push for the playoffs? Well, that’s the Cincinnati Reds themselves. As Gordon Wittenmyer of The Enquirer noted, the Reds aren’t going to realign their starting rotation for the final week of the season, and that means Hunter Greene is now theoretically lined up to be on plenty of rest for the first game of a Wild Card series, should the Reds make it. While it does seem brash on some level to hold back an ace to be ready for playoffs you may not make, it’s also an endorsement of the quality of the rest of the arms in the Reds rotation.
In case you’ve been under a rock all year, Reds starting pitchers have accrued 15.2 fWAR so far this season, and that’s behind only the elite starting rotation in Philadelphia atop the MLB leaderboard. If you’ve actually been under a rock this season, I should probably tell you that they’ve climbed to that level despite Greene having missed some two months with injury, so the guys they’ll be turning to this week around him are plenty damn qualified.
As things stand, it looks as if the starters to wrap the year will be Brady Singer, Hunter Greene, and Nick Lodolo against Pittsburgh with Zack Littell, Andrew Abbott, and Singer again going on the road against Milwaukee. Littell’s home/road splits are a bit tougher to decipher since he pitched over half the year in the AL East with Tampa, but Andrew Abbott actually has held opponents to a lower OPS (.641 on the road, .669 in GABP) this year despite his ERA being higher on the road (3.31 vs. 2.39), and his K/BB is wildly better in road games. Singer, meanwhile, has yielded an OPS .100 points higher in road games than in GABP and owns a 4.75 ERA away from GABP (vs. a 3.07 at home), so don’t be surprised if the season’s final regular season game ends up a Nick Martinez special (if the Reds haven’t, y’know, already clinched by then).
Over at Redleg Nation, Doug Gray broke down the updated odds of the Reds making the playoffs given their work over the weekend, and it’s clear the odds-makers hate Cincinnati and love New York. Technically, that’s not true at all, but you’ll probably feel that way.