Photo credit should read LUCY NICHOLSON/AFP via Getty Images
Are they even addressing the issue the right way?
On the whole, the offense of the Cincinnati Reds has been mostly OK in 2025, though
mostly is carrying a lot of weight here.
Since Opening Day, they sport a collective .319 wOBA that ranks as the 12th best overall, though their park-adjusted wRC+ of 96 ranks them tied for 18th - in other words, wRC+ suggests that they really should be doing more offensive damage given that they play in Great American Ball Park so much, but they haven’t been.
They are 9th in runs scored, though the 55 games they’ve played is tied for the most in the game - the Philadelphia Phillies, for instance, have played just 53 games yet have scored 5 more runs than the Reds (260 to 255). Again, that’s totally fine, though far from excellent.
Somehow, though, that’s not at all what it
feels like most nights.
When the Reds wrapped up their series loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates with Wednesday’s 3-1 loss, it marked the 14th time ( if I’m counting correctly) that they’d scored 1 or 0 runs in a game this season, with 8 shutouts already on their ledger. And if you look back and discount the 59 runs the Reds dumped on the miserable Colorado Rockies and pitcherless Baltimore Orioles across 9 days (and 6 games) in mid-April, the overall body of work begins to look much more threadbare than on the surface.
Injuries have forced rotations for manager Terry Francona that I’m sure he wouldn’t want to remember for too long. They’ve been without Jeimer Candelario and Christian Encarnacion-Strand for most all of the season, though we can debate whether that’s a
good or
bad thing later on. Jake Fraley has been out a ton, while Tyler Stephenson missed a month and is just now getting back to the swing of things. The offense was, for a time, carried completely by backup catchers Jose Trevino and Austin Wynns, while Spencer Steer still mostly looks a shell of his former self as he tries to shrug off mysterious shoulder pains.
One thing that’s been impossible to overlook, though, is the dismal performance of Matt McLain this year, and how much the weight of expectations heaped upon him has dragged down this offense as a whole.
McLain, too, spent time on the IL already this year, a minimum stint there in early April with a hamstring issue. Since returning to the lineup full-time on April 15th, he’s logged 163 PA and hit a feeble .179/.284/.264 in the process. The Reds, though, held fast to the idea that he was the perfect player for the #2 spot in the lineup, giving him run there day in and day out until finally pulling the plug on that on May 12th.
Since dropping McLain in the order, the #2 spot has been doled out to Santiago Espinal, for some reason. To Espinal’s credit, he’d hit a reasonable enough .295/.357/.352 in a part-time role through May 12th, though he’s a 30 year old with over 1600 PA in his big league career that suggests he’s what the back of his baseball card reveals - a .266/.322/.360 hitter.
(For the record, Espinal has hit a punchless .224/.283/.265 in 53 PA since taking over as the regular #2 hitter on May 13th.)
If you’re wondering why I’m harping on the #2 spot in the order,
I’ll let Mike Petriello of MLB.com help do the explaining. Towards the end of the 2023 season, he analyzed how for the first time in the live ball era the collective production from the #2 spot in teams’ lineups outpaced that of the #3 spot, an indication that lineup construction had fundamentally changed from the era where speedy guy hit #1, the low-K guy who could bunt and slap singles the other way hit #2, and the good-hittin’ RBI-guys batted #3 and #4.
In modern baseball, teams hit their best hitters in the #2 spot. And the 2025 Reds, as things would have it, have been routinely getting most of their worst production from any part of their lineup from the #2 spot in the batting order.
How bad have theirs been so far?
Bad.
By wOBA, their collective .264 from the #2 spot ranks 2nd to last, better than only that of the Cleveland Guardians (.219). By wRC+, that’s a similar story - their collective 59 ranks 2nd worst ahead of only Cleveland (37).
Cincinnati’s .067 ISO from #2 hole hitters is dead last among the 30 MLB clubs. They’ve gotten just a .252 slugging percentage from #2 hole hitters this year, and that’s also dead last. With those numbers in mind, it shouldn’t suprise you that
the 3 dingers they’ve gotten from the #2 spot in the order this year is also dead last in the game.
Photo by Ben Jackson/Getty Images
The lack of production itself is alarming, but that’s not even the interesting part here to me.
It’s not as if the Reds have, say, a Joey Votto in their lineup hitting #2 every night and not producing to his previously established standards. The way they’ve built this roster now features almost nothing but unproven hitters on whom they have heaped expectations without production at the big league level to truly back it up just yet, hoping upon hope that McLain
ends up a prototypical #2 hitter while Elly De La Cruz
ends up a guy like that in the #3 spot, too.
Thing is, neither has really had the chance to prove they could do that yet, let along have either actually proven it. Aside from TJ Friedl doing vintage leadoff-hitter things again the way he did in his own breakout 2023 season, the rest of the Reds lineup production reflects just how ‘off’ the team’s heaped expectations have been so far in 2025.
While their #2 hitters - the guys who are supposed to be the ‘best’ hitters in the lineup everyday - have struggled as bad as any, the collective wOBA from their #8 hitters has been the 6th best in the game so far. The .357 wOBA from their #9 hitters, meanwhile, has been the 2nd best in the game. In other words, they’re getting brilliant production from the spots in the lineup where they didn’t expect to get it, and they’re getting terrible production from the spots in the lineup where they truly were depending on it.
As lineup construction theory goes, there’s really no bigger way to ‘miss’ than that.
This isn’t so suggest that Jose Trevino should immediately be moved to the #2 spot for the rest of the season, or even that he’s a good bet to out-hit McLain from now through the end of the season. It’s merely me pointing out that because the Reds front office was intent on rolling out a roster with so many unprovens that they’ve effectively ‘missed’ on what could have been their peak lineup construction for a full third of a regular season because unproven options simply didn’t break out in the way they had hoped.
That’s not damning as much as it is to be expected, even from a future Hall of Fame manager like Terry Francona. Given what his day to day options have been, it’s hard not to see him bank on McLain emerging as a superstar as a go-to option. Steer’s production, had it come from the #2 spot, would have me writing this very same article right now, and if Elly had been there we’d be writing this whole thing about the #3 spot. Still, as the club tries to dig its way back over .500 and into the playoff chase, I still have a very hard time figuring out how I’d stack this lineup deck on the daily given what we’ve seen - and not seen - from the key pieces so far.
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/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/26008890/2148462382.jpg "Milwaukee Brewers v Cincinnati Reds")
