Elly De La Cruz cruised into the 2025 All Star Game with an .854 OPS to his name, having hit a cool .284/.359/.495 in his second full season as a Major Leaguer. He’d hit 18 homers and swiped 25 bags through
97 games, putting him on a full-season 30/40 pace – all while being the rangy anchor of their middle infield and a burgeoning superstar of the sport.
For his Hall of Fame career, Scott Rolen hit .281/.364/.490 – an .855 OPS. Adam Dunn sported a career .854 OPS, Rafael Devers sits at .855 next to Hall of Famer Al Kaline, and Hall of Famer George Brett is right there with an .856. These are elite numbers, and through the first ~60% of the 2025 season Elly hadn’t just reached them, he’d done so at such an early age and with such ease that you felt confident he was still only scratching the surface of his talents.
Something, though, fell completely apart for Cincinnati’s star shortly after the All Star break. In 52 games from August 1st through the end of the regular season, he hit just 3 more dingers while slashing a paltry .221/.280/.341 (.621 OPS) in 225 PA. To his credit (or detriment, perhaps), he still played absolutely every single day, eventually leading all baseball with 162 games played during the 162 game regular season.
As we discovered last night on the Reds Hot Stove League broadcast from President of Baseball Operations Nick Krall, Elly was playing through a torn quad suffered at some point in late July. He’s on the mend just fine now, for the record, and there doesn’t appear to be worry of lingering problems heading in to 2026, but it’s pretty baffling in hindsight that the club simply let their star player gut through such an injury instead of, y’know, shutting him down for two weeks and letting the damn thing heal.
I’m old enough to remember Jonathan India being sidelined for what, at the time, was considered a ridiculous amount of time while letting his hamstring recover. I, too, remember Donovan Solano missing roughly half of his Reds career while on the shelf with a similar soft-tissue injury.
It’s one thing if they’d let Elly play through this and he was still producing, but offensively he fell from the aforementioned level reached by Hall of Famers to levels I’ll detail a bit below.
Doug Flynn, ‘The Glue’ of the Big Red Machine, hit 7 dingers across 11 years in the big leagues, in which time he racked up an impressive -6.9 bWAR over the course of his career. Just 7 dingers, though, in some 4085 career PA, 411 of which came with the Reds across 1975-1977. His slugging percentage during that stint with the Reds, you ask? It was .341.
Sparky Anderson, who’d tell anyone who’d listen that he got into managing because he couldn’t hit, hit .218 with a .282 OBP in his lone season in the bigs in 1959.
Paul ‘Soft J’ Janish, oft-used shortstop for the Reds from 2008 through 2011, hit .221 in his Reds career.
The inimitable Corky Miller and his incredible mustache plied his trade across the game’s highest level for parts of 11 years. In 616 career PA, he posted an on-base percentage of .277.
Juan Castro, ‘Manos de Oro,’ stuck around the big league game for 17 years, eventually plying his trade with five different franchises purely for his defensive prowess and key positions on the infield. Never a slugger by any stretch of the imagination, his production gradually fell off a cliff in his late 30’s, but his mid-career run with the Reds across five seasons saw him hit .237/.276/.353 (.628 OPS) in 1469 PA.
You may recall Paul Bako’s illustrious stint behind the plate for the Reds back in the 2008 season. He hit .217/.299/.328 (.626 OPS) in 338 PA for them.
It wasn’t just his offense that was struggling, either. He committed 11 errors across those final 52 games, and he swiped only 8 bases (while being caught twice). Elly, as we’d come to know him, simply wasn’t right at all, and it’s really hard in hindsight to fathom that nobody within the Reds dugout or front office had the wherewithal to suggest he get himself right and healed for a little bit.
Hell, Matt McLain was right there capable of a) not hitting but b) healthily playing shortstop. Sal Stewart had bashed his way to AAA and could’ve stepped in somewhere on an infield that could have also featured Spencer Steer and Gavin Lux in various capacities at 2B/1B.
In a separate vein, I admire the hell out of Elly’s willingness to put this pain out of mind and show up ready to grind every single day. It’s a stubbornness that I hope permeates much of the rest of his game, the rest of his life, a persistence that leads him to better at bats, better seasons, better victories. Still, there’s a reason why the head of the dugout is called the ‘manager’ and not the coach, a ‘manager’ who has a ‘general manager’ sitting above him. It’s their job to manage players who might otherwise do things in ways detrimental to both themselves and the team even in the name of good, something that sure seemed to be going on here even as the Reds backed their way into the playoffs with just 83 wins.
