First, I’ll try to chime in as the season progresses, but we’re starting our own baseball season here because I have a kid who is that age and serious and so it goes. It might be summer before I have a chance to write again. Everyone hold down the fort and look up your stats in my absence.
I keep staring at the Cincinnati Reds roster and I keep thinking that it’s underwhelming, because it is, but also feeling like it’s going to over perform expectations. A lot of this is just feel, but I do think there’s something the various projections and prognosticators are missing, and it goes like this.
Elly De La Cruz is a superstar. No one thinks he’s going to back slide because all we’ve ever heard is that he’s really smart and works really hard. (editors note: And he’s on pace to homer in every at-bat he has this season, which might set a new record)
Tyler Stephenson is a very good catcher with a very good backup in Jose Trevino, and he’s finally got the injuries in his rearview mirror.
Matt McLain is probably going to be very good. Even the projections think he’s going to be very good.
I don’t know if Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Jeimer Candelario will be good this year. I do know it’s impossible to imagine first base and third base being collective worse than last year. Nowhere to go but up.
The outfield is not great, but it has a pack of guys who should manage to be collectively average. There’s no indication the Austin Hays illness should linger. Nor the TJ Friedl injuries. Basically, the whole bunch bottomed out last year.
Really, except for De La Cruz, Stephenson, Nick Martinez, and Hunter Greene, the whole team had a bad year last year.
And they still scored more runs than they allowed. Given average luck, they’d have been 82-80. And this year’s team is not worse than last year’s team. Instead this year’s team has a lot of guys who are likely to have a better year than they had last year.
We will see what we will see, but games are starting, and I’m feeling optimistic. Do I think they’ll win 100? No. But I think 90 wins is more likely than 70. And that’s a better place than we’ve been in a lot of recent years.
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