The Cincinnati Reds are out to a fantastic start as a team. They are 18-10, in first place in the National League Central division, and only the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, and Atlanta Braves have a better record in all of Major League Baseball.
But that doesn’t mean that everything has gone well for the team. While the offense has been on a roll for the most part over the last two weeks, there are a lot of players who still are struggling to hit. The offense for the year has basically been Sal Stewart and Elly De La Cruz crushing the ball and then hoping that they would get enough help from some random other guy in the lineup on a given night. No other regular is even close to being a league average hitter – with Spencer Steer being the closest and he’s still 9% worse than the league average with a 91 OPS+ mark (OPS adjusted for parks played in with 100 being league average).
Bench guys Nathaniel Lowe and Dane Myers have stepped up when given the chance to play, but both guys are just shy of 50 plate appearances on the season. After crushing the ball in Triple-A with Louiville, veteran JJ Bleday came up over the weekend and in his start on Sunday picked up a home run and a walk. He’s now been on base in every game he’s played this season except for his first game of the year. We’ll see how well he can continue to hit and how he will continue to be used.
Guys like Tyler Stephenson (53 OPS+), Matt McLain (84 OPS+), TJ Friedl (49 OPS+), and Ke’Bryan Hayes (6 OPS+) simply have to hit better. All of them should be better than that. They’ve all been better that in the past. And there’s little reason to believe that their current performance is “who they are”. But they have all slumped hard to begin the season, though McLain has turned things around a bit in the last week after hitting .269/.345/.615 against Tampa Bay and Detroit.
The pitching has been similar to the hitting. Some guys are really getting the job done and other guys are struggling in a big way.
Last season Andrew Abbott was a National League All-Star. This season if he were a rookie there’d be talked about how he needs to go to the minor leagues because he currently has a 6.59 ERA through six starts. Just how tough has his start to the year been? Well, he threw six shutout innings on opening day but has still allowed 21 earned runs this season. Last year he allowed 21 earned runs through his first 16 starts, covering 91.1 innings. He didn’t give up his 22nd earned run until AFTER the All-Star break.
He’s not the only guy struggling, though. Brandon Williamson, who only made the rotation because of injuries to Nick Lodolo and Hunter Greene in spring training, has an ERA of 5.40 and he’s leading the league in walks, is striking out no one, and has 19 walks+hit batsmen in just 25.0 innings pitched. Brady Singer’s ERA is 4.97.
Singer and Abbott both have long track records of performing significantly better than this. They will probably be fine moving forward, but they have struggled quite a bit this season.
The pitching staff has been carried by Rhett Lowder and Chase Burns in the rotation and then by the staples of the bullpen. Only the last guy out of the bullpen at a given time has struggled – whoever that happened to be at the time.
Things tend to even out over the long haul of a season. Right now the Reds have been at the extremes in so many ways. The offense has been brutal, the bullpen has been lights out, and the rotation has been iffy at best. When things start to even out in all of those phases hopefully there will be some more consistency from game to game, but hopefully it means that the team can maintain their winning ways. Sure, they aren’t likely to continue winning at a .643 pace – that’s a 104 win pace – but not having to rely on two hitters to do enough damage in a game and get to the bullpen and hope they don’t give up a run could go a long way.