The struggles of the Cincinnati Reds offense as a whole during the 2026 regular season has been documented well – here, there, and everywhere. The top-heavy nature of the lineup featured a back-beat that was mostly non-existent for months at a time, and overall the latter outweighed the former by season’s end.
They ranked dead last in team wRC+ at 91, after all (and we’ll have more on that on Friday).
Along the way, though, they did manage to jump to the top of the team leaderboards in a rather unique
way, whether by distinct coaching towards a particular test or by sheer luck. And given which other teams (and their potent bats) rank right next to them, it might be the one thing on which they can offensively hang their hat when looking back at this otherwise dismal year.
No team – not a single one – posted a higher collective launch angle than the Cincinnati Reds. Their 16.2 degree figure was the best in the sport, with the high-octane Chicago Cubs up in 3rd at 15.9 degrees and the mighty New York Yankees tied for 4th at 15.4 degrees. Innocence by association isn’t everything, obviously, but it’s hard not to notice when some of the best put-together lineups also excel at something the Reds did (and it’s worth pointing out the Los Angeles Dodgers ranked just past that tie for 4th in 7th at 15.1 degrees). Those team don’t operate on hunches, they actively seek to rank well where they end up ranking well, and in this particular category it was somehow the Reds ranking on top.
Launch angle is not an end-all, be-all metric, however. Sometimes it could reflect that you pop the ball up too much, and if you strike out so much that you don’t feature enough batted ball events it doesn’t matter that you do smack line drives when you actually make your one contact for the game. Batted Ball Events (BBE) is notable here particularly since no team in the sport had fewer than the Reds did, their 3,893 mark nearly 500 fewer than the league-leading Tampa Bay Rays. The Cubs, for reference, again ranked well here at 4th.
Launch Angle Sweet-Spot % tends to to help narrow the focus of all of this. It tracks how often players (or teams, in this instance) hit a ball between 8 degrees and 32 degrees, effectively reducing how often a pop-fly would help skew an overall launch angle. The Reds, to their credit, ranked 4th in the game here, trailing only the likes of the Detroit Tigers, Dodgers, and Coors-leaning Colorado Rockies. Pair that with ranking 4th in average exit velocity, and it’s clear the Reds did a better-than-expected job of hitting line drives and hitting them hard relative to their peers.
Again, though, these two stats come with their quirks. Strikeouts don’t factor into the denominator when calculating LA SwSp%, and the Reds struck out a lot. Average exit velocity doesn’t factor in the zero mph velocity of striking out, either, and if it did the Reds number would sink by a large margin.
The lone concern here – aside from the striking out profusely part – is that two of the Reds who ranked best in terms of launch angle and LA SwSp% were Tyler Stephenson and Eugenio Suarez, the latter of whom got hot just as the Reds were falling out of the race for good and actually finished is overall disappointing 2026 rather well. Both of them, of course, will almost certainly reach free agency within days of the end of this year’s World Series, taking their launch angle talents to another team that seeks them. JJ Bleday found the sweet spot pretty often while Matt McLain’s 20.7 degree launch angle ranked 14th among qualified batters, but a large chunk of the one decent stat where the Reds ranked well in 2026 is still about to walk to another team, with no clear launch angle darlings in the upper minors ready to step in and replace them.
And before you flush this topic down the toilet, it’s worth pointing out some of the names that rank among the Top 20 on these particular lists. Cal Raleigh, Isaac Paredes, Zach Neto, PCA, and Mickey Moniak all rank among the Top 10 in launch angle, with Byron Buxton (20th), Kyle Schwarber (21st), and Kevin McGonigle (23rd) and featuring prominently, too. Yordan Alvarez, and Riley Green sandwich Stephenson in the Top 10 in LA SwSp%, with Mookie Betts and Steven Kwan both in the Top 10, too. Two of the Brewers best hitters (Brice Turang and Jake Bauers) just missed the Top 20, as did Freddie Freeman (22nd) – Nick Kurtz of the A’s ranked 19th.
It didn’t all pan out in the end, of course. Too many holes in swings, too many streaks, too little overall contact. But at least there may be a methodology underlying all of this if the Reds could just find a few more bats competent enough to make it happen.
