What the Cincinnati Reds need to make a playoff run in 2025

Photo by Jeff Dean/Getty Images

A lot has been made of ‘expected’ stats permeating the baseball analytics landscape and how they do yeoman’s work to determing how good a player probably ‘should’ have been.

Expected Weighted On-Base Average (xwOBA), for instance, was put together to estimate how much offense you should have expected a batter to produce based on things like exit velocity, launch angle, and the player’s sprint speed. In other words, if they’re only hitting .210 with a 10.1% HR/FB rate but they’re smashing line drives

over 100 mph off the bat all the time, you’d be considered very reasonable to suggest that they’ve simply been a bit unlucky and better times are right around the corner.

When a player isn’t producing and their expected stats - xwOBA, xBA (expected Batting Average), and xSLG (expected Slugging) - all rank in the bottom tier of the game, that’s when you begin to think things simply are not going well for good reason.

Photo by Jeff Dean/Getty Images

Expectations heaped upon certain players are harder to quantify than expected statistics, but they can also tell a pretty distinct story. Take, for instance, a Major League Baseball team going out of their way to trade an established player at a particular position to clear a path to everyday playing time for a younger, less established one. That’s a pretty clear indication they’ve got high expectations for the younger guy’s production, as is the conscious decision to bat said player 2nd in the batting order almost every single time they’re healthy enough to play.

The Cincinnati Reds went out of their way to trade for Jose Trevino this winter, sure, and they even gave him a contract extension. And he’s hit well - that 104 OPS+ so far is certainly better than anybody I know expected. That said, he’s batted 9th more than he’s hit anywhere else in the lineup when playing, and hasn’t started a game in a batting order hitting higher than 6th.

In other words, while the Reds built their roster and daily lineups with hope Trevino would hit like this, they clearly weren’t banking on it. Him hitting like this where he is in the lineup is simply a very much appreciated bonus.

The Reds, right now, have the single worst slugging percentage (.272) from the collective work of their #2 hitters in the lineup of any club in baseball, and it’s not particularly close. Cleveland, who’s the next worst, is slugging .322. By wOBA, HR, RBI, and wRC+, Reds #2 spot hitters rank 29th out of the 30 MLB clubs - whether you believe in new-age statistics or the vintage ones, they’ve been simply abysmal in their production there. Their .080 ISO also, predictably, ranks dead last.

It’s a bit alarming that it’s already been nearly two decades since Tom Tango released ‘The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball,’ a groundbreaking analytical look at the game in ways I’d never fathomed before. In it, Tango breaks down lineup optimization theory, effectively emphasizing that a team’s three best hitters should probably hit 1st, 2nd, and 4th based on a litany of inputs (like number of times they get to the plate, how often they’re up with nobody on, and countless others). It’s no secret that the old days of hitting ‘a guy who can handle the bat and bunt the leadoff guy over’ in the #2 spot have gone by the wayside, and Aaron Judge, Ketel Marte, Rafael Devers, James Wood, and Kyle Tucker now routinely bat 2nd in their respective lineups.

Whether they read The Book before bed every night and worship it by day or merely pay enough attention to what its byproducts have produced, front offices and dugouts now know that they need to have perhaps their single best bat hitting in the #2 hole every night. So, for the Reds to have struggled so, so badly in a spot that’s so, so important means one of two things - either their expectations on the guy being tasked with hitting 2nd were wildly off-base, or that guy is long overdue for a complete reversal of fortune.

McLain’s Statcast percentile rankings that don’t exactly scream ‘bad luck.’

That guy, more often than not, has been Matt McLain. He’s logged 217 PA in the #2 spot so far this season, and he’s hit a meager .191/.296/.293 (67 wRC+) in that time. Santiago Espinal (a brutal 36 wRC+ in 131 PA hitting 2nd) hasn’t helped the overall numbers, either, though he only ended up there when McLain was hurt early this year and after McLain hit so badly there that he was dropped to the bottom of the order.

In other words, the Reds didn’t just enter this season expecting McLain to be significantly better than he’s been, they entered this season with expectations that he would quite literally be one of the two or three bats that carried this lineup. Instead, he’s been one of the worst bats they’ve rolled out all year, the lost 2024 season and multiple shoulder and oblique injuries clearly putting more rust on him than was expected.

The Reds moved Jonathan India to Kansas City to free up a role for McLain. They’ve committed to him being one of the faces of this franchise. Despite all of his struggles so far, they’re still 3 games over .500 and have eyes on a Wild Card path to the playoffs. To get to that end, though, they’re going to have to make some really tough, really shrewd decisions to make the product on the field better.

Chief among them, in my opinion, is whether they have their #2 hitter, or need a new one. They need to figure out if what they’ve asked of McLain in 2025 is simply too much, or whether he’s just been worse than he will be by season’s end. That’s not even suggesting that they go out and trade for a big bat - these are the Reds, after all, and that’s never their M.O. This is merely them determining if they’re finally ready to back off their 2025 hopes for McLain and shake up the top of the lineup to get more out of the outstanding production they’ve received from the likes of TJ Friedl, Elly De La Cruz, and Austin Hays around McLain’s foibles.

Maybe they should move Elly up to 2nd. Maybe they should flip-flop Spencer Steer with McLain, seeing as Steer has shrugged off his early-season shoulder issues to post an .871 OPS over his last 35 games. Regardless, it’s just about time they realized that while McLain is still young enough and talented enough to show a lot more than he has, it just might not be on his back that this team gets carried to the playoffs in 2025.

More from redreporter.com:

• The Reds have a problem on their hands
• Reds Tournament of the 2000s: Round 2
• An early look at the Reds 2017 schedule
• Brewers scored plenty, Reds didn't. Reds lost, 7-0.
• Joey Votto homered to back a great Dan Straily start, Reds beat Brewers, 6-4
• The 2017 MLB Draft: Six pitchers to know
• 18 Games at a time - Capsule 8