The Cincinnati Reds offense is sputtering

The Reds dropped 2 of 3 on the road against the Rangers.

The We Love Joey Votto hub on the Red Reporter dot come homepage will never disappear, but it’s soon to be joined by a We Love Elly De La Cruz hub of its own.

We’ve fallen for the budding superstar of the Cincinnati Reds of late, and have noted just how absurd his beginning to the 2024 MLB season has been. Since April 8th, for instance, he boasts a .302/.429/.667 line and .467 wOBA across 19 G, that OPS (1.095) and wOBA each ranking as the 4th best offensive mark in all of baseball.

Since April 9th, however, the entirety of the Reds offense has hit the skids, and not even the stellar performance from Elly has managed to dig them out of the dregs.

The team’s wOBA since April 9th sits at a dismal .285, tied with the lowly St. Louis Cardinals for the 5th lowest in the sport. Their wRC+ of 75 ranks even worse, with only the Pittsburgh Pirates (70), Colorado Rockies (70), and Chicago White Sox (72) producing worse marks in that span.

While the date range of that set of stats seems completely arbitrary, it’s not too different than the tale told by the season as a whole at this point. Of the 307 MLB players who have logged at least 50 PA so far this season, each of Stuart Fairchild (38), Santiago Espinal (40), and Christian Encarnacion-Strand (42) rank among the bottom 26 league-wide in wRC+, with Nick Martini (58) and Jeimer Candelario (61) not too far behind. That’s five more or less everyday regulars given the team’s injury and suspension woes, all of whom who are producing at a clip disastrously below league-average. For the season as a whole, the team’s 87 wRC+ sits as the 6th worst mark in all of baseball.

Not even Spencer Steer has been immune to the offensive struggles. The team’s do-it-all defender rightfully took home National League Player of the Week honors on April 8th after his blistering start to the season, but he’s slumped just as hard in the time since then. Since April 14th, he’s the owner of just a .407 OPS across 14 G, his 25 wRC+ the 4th worst among 123 qualified MLB hitters in that time.

The struggles of Candelario have been just as evident, perhaps moreso given his status as well-inked veteran free agent who was brought in to stabilize things amidst a sea of youth. Since missing time with an illness during the series in Seattle (in which he socked a homer, to be fair), he’s gone just 2 for 24 with a 6/14 BB/K in 8 G. His last 6 G have been even more dire: 0 for 19 with 12 K, a series in Texas he’ll surely try to forget as soon as possible.

All told, it’s a unit that looks like it has been exposed and overmatched, and it’s hard to blame them at this juncture. This was a club that was built to be mixing and matching, with TJ Friedl atop the lineup and both Matt McLain and Noelvi Marte mixed within. The platoons that Nick Krall had given David Bell were to be exploited, not left out to dry, though more and more that’s what we’ve been forced to witness with this Reds club, especially after the extended illness absences of Jake Fraley, Candelario, and Jonathan India, among others.

Up next is a trio of games out west against the San Diego Padres, a club whose pitching so far this season has been just about as suspect as the Reds hitting. Perhaps this is the precise series for what’s left of the Cincinnati offense to begin to find its groove, since the last two-plus weeks have been anything but.s