Every year as a new season dawns, I do my best to come up with spur of the moment, lightly researched predictions for the upcoming season. I am not living completely under a rock, however, so these do tend
to be hunches that accumulate over months of casual offseason observance of happenings around the league, and while I don’t normally scour my spreadsheets prior to making these calls, there’s at least a smidgen of real reasoning behind why I go with them.
I also try to make them a bit outlandish, because nobody needs to waste time reading that Tarik Skubal is going to be really good.
Therefore, they start out as dumb predictions. And when the end of the season rolls around, they almost always end up looking even dumber!
Here’s the link to my Five Dumb Predictions for the 2025 Cincinnati Reds I made back in March.
Get out your red (Reds?) pens and start the grading!
1) Nick Lodolo clears 150 IP, leads all Reds pitchers in WAR
Hey! I got this one correct!
Well, I got the idea of it correct, at least.
All signs pointed towards Nick Lodolo entering this season as healthy as he’s been at any point of his tenure with the Reds, and that paired with his talent meant I felt confident he’d end up leading the line for Cincinnati pitchers. He held up his end of the bargain, too, firing 156.2 innings of brilliant 3.33 ERA ball – good for 4.9 bWAR and a hefty bump in his salary via arbitration this winter.
That’s about as good as I could have asked for, and given Hunter Greene’s inability to stay healthy for a full season I felt confident that ‘150+ innings of Lodolo pitching as good as he can’ would be the default for ‘best Reds pitcher.’ Fortunately, I completely overlooked Andrew Abbott’s ability to be even better than that, and that’s precisely what he was.
Abbott topped Lodolo in bWAR (5.6 to 4.9) and fWAR (3.9 to 2.8 in a really awkwardly terrible underestimation of them both), so I only get half credit for this one. Props to both Nick and Andrew on pretty damn stellar seasons, though!
2) TJ Friedl steals 40 bags
TJ Friedl did not steal 40 bags. No Cincinnati Red stole 40 bags, even, as the runnin’ Redlegs of the David Bell era held up completely under new manager Terry Francona, who opted to rein in his speedsters in lieu of making too many outs on the bases, something that still seems incredibly odd given this team is build on singles and speed and nothing else.
I digress.
Friedl, I thought, would be back to the healthy pre-injury guy he was in 2023, and a full season atop the order with his OBP skills would produce some runnin’. I was wrong. He barely moved. He stole 12 bags, which is not 40 bags.
3) Sal Stewart is a key cog in the infield by season’s end
At just 21 years of age, Sal Stewart bashed his way through the AA Southern League to begin the 2025 season before completely obliterating AAA International League pitching for 38 games.
Then, in August, he got the call from the Reds themselves.
Across 18 games and 58 PA, Stewart mashed to the tune of a 121 OPS+, socking 5 dingers and helping the moribund offense squeak into the playoffs by the smallest of margins.
The only question now, though, is where he’ll play in the infield going forward, as the front office’s incredibly odd decision to acquire Ke’Bryan Hayes and his noodle of a bat at the hot corner has created a logjam at 1B with Stewart and Spencer Steer.
Sal, though, officially arrived. I’m 1.5 for 3.
4) Elly De La Cruz socks 44 dingers
I’m 1.5 for 4.
Elly got off to a hot enough start to the 2025 season, a hot June leaving him with 18 homers through his first 79 games of the season. That’s not quite a 44-dinger pace, but it isn’t too far off, and my hopes on this one were still high heading into the heat of the summer when balls usually begin to fly out of every park – especially GABP.
Sadly, hitting coach Chris Valaika got to Elly (and the rest of the offense) and turned each hitter on the roster into peak Jack Hannahan, and Elly went eons without so much as hitting even one dinger. He finished with just 22 on the season despite his legendary power, and it’s just the starting point for questions to be asking about what the living hell the front office and coaching staff actually has in mind for this roster.
5) The Reds – yes, the Reds – make the playoffs
I’d like to personally thank Rob Manfred for expanding the playoffs so much that you, me, little Jimmy, and even the Cincinnati Reds can find a way to make the playoffs despite entering the final week of a 6+ month season wondering if they could even finish the year over .500.
The superexpanded megaplayoffs have diluted the sport and made the regular season significantly less meaningful, but despite that having been the case for years the Reds still hadn’t found a way to sneak into them for some 13 years. That changed in 2025 as they held a tiebreaker over the New York Mets that earned them the #6 seed in the NL Playoffs and a chance to finally play on the big stage again.
I’m still reconciling my feelings about the 2025 Reds. They never felt like they were really a ‘good’ team despite their elite pitching, and I still don’t know exactly how many of the pieces they have seem like they should be around long-term. Still, they were good enough to clear this particular threshold before crashing out, and that’s not nothing.
2.5 out of 5. I’ll take it!
