A wasted weekend against the Orioles has them skidding fast.
The Cincinnati Reds scored a run on Sunday, and even managed to pound out a trio of hits. They scored a run on 6 hits on Saturday, also in a loss, after posting nary a run on just 2 hits in Friday’s series opening loss to the Baltimore Orioles.
The team’s offense is firmly in a deep, dark rut. The team has lost 5 games in a row and 8 of 10 despite downright good starting pitching during the last few weeks, and the team’s offense hasn’t just cratered, it’s even managed to crater within the usually productive confines of Great American Ball Park.
Look, we knew things weren’t going to be as rosy as they could have been once Matt McLain and TJ Friedl got injured and Noelvi Marte got suspended, but the season’s output so far has been positively pitiful on a number of different levels. Here are just a few different ways of spelling out how disastrous this 34 game stretch to start the season for them has been while the team’s starting rotation has been among the 8 best (per fWAR) in all of baseball.
In road games this year, the collective team offense owns a meager 77 wRC+. That’s the 2nd worst mark of any offensive unit in the game (behind the woeful Chicago White Sox). For reference, the venable Skip Schumaker posted a 75 wRC+ during his final season with the Reds in 2015.
Over the past 30 days (in all games) the Reds own an even worse 71 wRC+. That’s the single worst mark of all 30 MLB clubs in that time, and is right in-line with the 70 wRC+ Skip posted across is 2014-2015 seasons with the Reds combined.
The Reds have found a way to be not the most terrible team in the game against RHP so far this year, buoyed in part by just how much damage Elly De La Cruz has managed to do against them. As a team, they own an 80 wRC+ against righties, good for just 4th worst among all 30 clubs (though we’ll admit that both the White Sox and abysmal Colorado Rockies are two of the clubs who are worse right now). The Reds .289 wOBA against righties, however, ranks as 3rd worst.
As for some more detailed contract metrics, Statcast reveals that the Reds rank as the 2nd worst collective unit in terms of number of balls hit with exit velocities greater than 95 mph so far this year, with only 305 to their name. Once again, only the White Sox are worse.
Statcast also suggests that the Reds aren’t even huge victims of unluckiness. Their .233 expected batting average ranks as the 5th lowest among the 30 MLB clubs.
As for the individuals on the club, a look at where Reds hitters rank over the last 30 days doesn’t exactly make the numbers any more positive. 296 MLB players have logged at least 50 PA over that time, and Nick Martini, for instance, ranks as the 2nd worst among them per wRC+. His -1 (negative 1) mark has only been worsted by Jose Abreu, the former MVP who accepted a surpise demotion to AAA after being so improbably awful.
(I don’t mean to pile on Nick too much here, since each of Santiago Espinal (29), Stuart Fairchild (31), and Christian Encarnacion-Strand (45) rank among the bottom 27 players on that 296 player list. Only Elly De La Cruz - 15th with an amazing 176 wRC+ - ranks among the Top 100 overall among Reds hitters in that time.)
Does anything about what they’re doing truly stand out, though?
Their batted ball data is far from definitive, but there are at least a tidbits worth pointing out. With a 44.6% pull rate, they are the single most pull-happy team in all of baseball, and that’s coming despite their would-be platoon heavy lineup being forced to hit more often against same-handed pitching this year than manager David Bell would have ever dreamed. Still, if you toggle through the splits on that particular FanGraphs leaderboard, you’ll see that the Reds are both the most pull-happy as RHH vs LHP and as LHH vs RHP among baseball’s 30 teams this year, too. Is all this pull-ness by design?
The Reds offense also owns a rather paltry 34.9% fly-ball rate, which ranks just 26th among all MLB clubs. Considering their 45.0% grounder rate ranks 7th, they’re the owners of a poor 1.29 GB/FB rate, tied with the Rays for the 4th lowest in the game. (Miami’s miserable offense ranks as the worst in this category, for reference, with an ugly 1.74 mark.)
Perhaps the lone silver lining in this is that only two clubs have a lower BABIP than the Reds mark of .266. Given their low fly-ball rate, I think that’s got even more unluckiness baked into it than if they were an extreme fly-ball hitting club. That said, their 26.8% hard-hit rate (per FanGraphs) ranks as the 3rd worst among all clubs, so maybe they aren’t quite as unlucky as at first glance.
You don’t have to squint to see the Reds as a club that pulls the ball on the ground softly when they actually put the ball in play. That, of course, is when they aren’t striking out, which at 26.8% they do with the 3rd most frequency of any team in the game.
It has been ugly out there, folks. Perhaps the pending return of TJ Friedl will alleviate some of these issues, but not even TJ can singlehandedly rescue this bunch. There needs to be a shakeup of some quantity, be it demotions or benchings or swapping of roles, since what the Reds continue to roll out daily simply hasn’t gotten the job done.
