The season ended yesterday. We reflect.
The Cincinnati Reds wrapped their 2024 regular season with a 3-0 victory over the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field on Sunday. Ian Happ, as he is wont do to, did not sock a homer off the Reds, something you would have already known had you seen that I mentioned the Reds won 3-0.
(Happ did, however, chuck a ball wrapped in Franklins into the left field bleachers as beer money for the fans, which is pretty awesome.)
Beer money for the fans. What a fantastic concept for fans of a club who’ve watched year after year after year blow by with zero on-field success to show for it.
Cincinnati’s 77-85 record left them 16 games adrift of the NL Central champs this year, as the Milwaukee Brewers once again ran away with the division. Another 4th place finish in the Castellini family’s cap, now the 11th time since the family took over the Reds prior to the 2006 season in which they’ve failed to finish any higher than 4th.
They scored 5 more runs than their opponents – that’s good!
They were 15-28 in 1-run games this year – that’s bad, and worsted only by the historically bad Chicago White Sox (13-29)!
They experienced essentially lost seasons from the likes of Matt McLain, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and Tejay Antone. Top prospect Edwin Arroyo was shelved all year, too, while Connor Phillips fell completely off the boat. Noelvi Marte’s 80-game PED suspension may or may not be behind his wretched season, but wretched it was nonetheless.
Jeimer Candelario, the big offseason addition to the position player corps, posted a dismal 90 OPS+ and defense so poor he was valued at -0.4 fWAR and -0.6 bWAR for the year. Frankie Montas, the big offseason addition to the pitching staff, pitched so poorly for the already-dead Reds that he was shipped to division-winning Milwaukee at the trade deadline.
The offense as a whole posted a miserable 87 wRC+, worsted only by the Marlins, Pirates, Rockies, and White Sox – all division losers and a who’s who of the worst-run franchises in professional sports.
The Reds fired manager David Bell and bench coach Jeff Pickler with a week remaining in the season.
The Reds, as you probably noticed, once again missed the playoffs.
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Photo by Ben Jackson/Getty Images
The quickness with which this Reds season reached its nose-dive was rapid, but it wasn’t start the season 3-18 or 3-22 rapid. That’s a step in the right direction given much of the last decade, I’d suggest.
Elly De La Cruz was simply marvelous. He was valued by FanGraphs as a 6.4 fWAR player, the 9th highest total of any position player in baseball. He led the sport with 67 steals, became the first shortstop in big league history with 25 dingers and 65+ steals in a single season, and barely seemed to be scratching the surface of his talent at the ripe old age of 22.
Hunter Greene was sidelined late in the season for over a month, yet his overall body of work was still so impressive that Baseball Reference valued him at 6.3 bWAR – tied with presumptive AL Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal for the highest total in all Major League Baseball. He found a way to navigate his home games in the bandbox that is GABP (3.38 ERA, 1.10 WHIP in 14 GS) yet utterly dominated on the road (2.05 ERA, 0.924 WHIP in 12 GS), and will absolutely get some runner-up votes in NL Cy Young voting later this fall.
For the record, that 2.05 ERA was the single best mark of any pitcher who logged at least 70 IP away from home in 2024.
Second on that list? That would be Nick Martinez, whose 2.18 mark was equally as brilliant. His 3.21 FIP was actually the best among the regular Reds starting pitchers, a role he gracefully and exceptionally assumed after beginning as a swingman and watching as his peers fell by the wayside over and over again. The 142.1 IP he filed were his most in any big league season, and he’ll enter the free agent market a very, very coveted arm once opting out of his Reds deal. The Reds would be wise to extend him a qualifying offer to get some compensation for when he signs elsewhere.
The Reds also got a fully healthy season out of Tyler Stephenson, and he finally looked like the 1st round pick and franchise cornerstone they envisioned all those years ago. He swatted 19 dingers, logged 515 PA, posted a 112 OPS+, and accrued 3.0 fWAR (even though I’ve long thought every WAR metric woefully underrates catcher production). With just the 2025 and 2026 season under team control for Tyler, now 28, methinks the Reds need to hammer out an extension with him pronto (especially when you look at the lack of catching depth in the pipeline at the moment).
As the death kneel rang on the Reds season and what remained of the healthy arms on the roster consisted of waiver claims and relievers, Rhett Lowder was summoned perhaps a little earlier than we all expected. He started 6 games and cleared 30.2 IP over the final weeks of the season, and 2023’s 1st round pick will likely finish with votes on most every ballot cast for the 2024 NL Rookie of the Year. He’ll need to continue to pound the zone more often and limit walks, but his ability to induce weak contact and mix a wave of pitch options already looks like a brilliant, intuitive starter in the making.
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Photo by Ben Jackson/Getty Images
I didn’t start out here this morning to create a Good/Bad/Ugly article. That’s good, because I’m not really sure these Reds really fit that – they’re more of an Ugly/Good/Undefined amalgamation at the moment. There’s so, so much of the latter.
TJ Friedl? Broken and battered everything, and his hamstring injury seemed to completely remove him from the running game. He’s still just a calendar year removed from a 4 WAR season, and hopefully can move beyond this dismal follow-up campaign.
Andrew Abbott? Nick Lodolo? At times both were brilliant, yet both once again finished the season on the shelf with injuries that could be harbingers of what they’ll be up against over the grind of 162 game seasons going forward.
Graham Ashcraft? Banged up, too, and looking more and more like a guy who’s exposed as a starter without a defined, refined third offering on the mound. That two-pitch mix would be sexy as all hell on paper as a late-inning reliever, however…
Spencer Steer’s BABIP plunged almost 60 points from 2023 to 2024…is he more the former, or the latter?
Did a healthy year from Jonathan India play him in to the Reds plans for the future, or do the exact opposite?
How, and with whom, will the Reds overhaul their outfield? That group in entirety combined for just an 85 wRC+ and 1.5 fWAR, worsted only by the Royals and the unholy trio of the Rockies, Pirates, and White Sox. Will Benson, for all the tools and righty-mashing he showed in 2023, looked overmatched from the outset in 2024.
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The 2024 Reds head into the offseason already devoid of their Opening Day starter and 99.9% likely to lose Martinez to free agency, too. Each of Lodolo, Abbott, and Ashcraft finished the season hurt, while Brandon Williamson’s 2025 is already written-off as he’s set for Tommy John surgery. Even Jakob Junis, reliever-turned-starter, may well have pitched well enough to opt into free agency at season’s end, too.
The Reds, in other words, need to bolster their starting rotation this offseason.
Down in the bullpen, things went mostly OK as a whole for the unit for much of the year despite the oft implosions from presumptive closer Alexis Diaz. His velocity trended down, his peripherals trended ugly, and that leaves the back-end of the bullpen in a precarious spot.
Factor in that each of Martinez, Buck Farmer, and Justin Wilson will be free agents, and the bullpen, once again, needs another barrage of arms.
The Cincinnati infield was a disjointed and crowded mess prior to things falling apart in the spring, and on paper every single one of those options will be back in the mix for 2025 – as are Santiago Espinal and Ty France. Is that a good thing, though? Where can you put Candelario’s glove? Where can you put Marte, at all, with his offensive and defensive struggles? Can McLain a) come back healthy after multiple core and shoulder issues and b) return to the surprise power outburst of 2023, or was said power outburst the onus of those core muscle injuries in the first place?
The Reds are facing an infield cull of at least two players this winter, and that’s just to get back to a functional number of in-house options who didn’t combine to be good enough this year. I’d be searching for a corner upgrade if I were the front office.
The outfield, meanwhile, should be a complete free for all on the market. Friedl, when 100%, is good enough to be a vital member of a five-man outfield in a very important role, and that’s the lone thing that’s cemented about any of it. There’s nothing in the minors that seems ready to fill spots, meaning the Reds should be in search of as many big-league caliber outfield bats (AND GLOVES) as they can find. That’s an assertion that includes Steer, whose ability to cover time at 1B should be treated as the kind of roster bonus-spot that it is and not overlooked.
Not just one, but two legit corner outfield bats should be on Cincinnati’s shopping list this winter, though you can probably count on zero fingers the realistic scenarios where that ends up happening.
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Photo by Aaron Doster/Getty Images
It was nice to actually have expectations for the Reds this year. This miserable ownership group and handcuffed front office have so often wasted years of our lives providing us a bar so much lower than that.
They spent a little here and there over the winter, had a pretty good crop of guys coming off rookie years, and ran the bases like they were going to be the last man standing in a horror movie, even if that meant tripping on every other vine in the woods along the way.
It didn’t work out, again. They didn’t get help at the trade deadline, and we once again got to watch all of August and September through the lens of this isn’t the Reds year.
I’m not sure where I’ll file 2024 in my burgeoning briefcase of disappointing Reds seasons. Hopefully it ends more next to 2009 rather than 2021 in the corner where underachieving Reds clubs served as precursors for things to come. That will depend a lot on how well surgically repaired tendons and ligaments heal this winter, as well as how much 2025 really means to the people who bought this franchise two decades ago and promised up and down that they actually wanted to win baseball games for the city of Cincinnati.
Once again, the Reds head into the offseason with a head start on their peers, searching for the answers to more questions than they know how to ask. Hopefully, they get at least a couple more of them right this winter than they did last time around.