No team in Major League Baseball has scored fewer runs than the Cincinnati Reds so far in 2026. They’ve tallied 39 runs through 13 games played, and a lot of teams have actually only played 12 games (and still managed to put up more than 39 runs in total).
Their collective wRC+ of 74 is, unsurprisingly, the worst mark of any team in the game. They rank 28th in slugging (.327), 26th in on-base percentage (.290), 25th in ISO (.119), 26th in batting average (.208), 26th in wOBA (.286), and 28th in OPS
(.617).
There are several key characters in dragging this overall mark down, too.
Among the 314 MLB players who have logged at least 20 PA so far this season, only three can claim a lower slugging percentage than Ke’Bryan Hayes (.097). He owns the 3rd worst wRC+ among that group, too, a -30 mark that seems pretty hard to even fathom, while his .126 wOBA is the second worst mark in the sport. Not far behind him is the man he supplanted as the regular 3B of the Reds, Noelvi Marte, who owns a mark of just 11 (19th worst).
While they’re hitting the ball harder than they used to, the results – so far – have been pretty damn abysmal. The good news, if there is any here, is that their .260 BABIP as a team is second lowest, with only Seattle (.238) having been more unlucky. Considering they rank 3rd as a team in EV90 (106.0) and sport the single highest launch angle in the game (17.5 degrees), it certainly feels like there’s a lot more we should get to like from this crew as things advance. Their xwOBA – their expected wOBA – is at least a somewhat more respectable 23rd in the game.
All this comes despite the fact that Sal Stewart has been absolutely destroying each and every baseball thrown his way so far this season. Can you imagine how much more dismal the overall team marks would look if he’d been anything other than the league-leader in wOBA (.510)?
Though the collective hard contact provides at least a glimmer of optimism, this is a club that last year ranked pretty dismally in all of these categories, too. Last year’s team didn’t have Stewart until September – at which point he hit the ground running doing a lot of what he’s been doing to start this season, too – though the rest of the club looked punchless more often than not.
There’s hope that Eugenio Suarez begins to round into form, even though he’s being tasked with DH duties everyday for the first time in his career, and that Elly De La Cruz continues to morph back into the offensive force he was before his quad injury. Still, there just appears to be either an overriding plethora of punchless offensive profiles on this roster or a coaching staff that’s coaxing them through a process that makes them that way, as the 2026 club doesn’t appear to be remade in a wholly different fabric than the 2025 that struggled all season long.
