Nobody pulls the ball like the Cincinnati Reds

I mean nobody!

Ignoring the totality of box scores is something being a fan of the Cincinnati Reds has done to me over the years.

Take last night, for instance. The Reds, according to the box score, got smoked late by a terrible Chicago White Sox club and lost yet another home game - this time by the score of 5-1. The box score is ugly, aside from Andrew Abbott’s rock solid start and a 2-hit night from Elly De La Cruz that featured the below dinger:

Elly waited patiently for that breaking ball to come back over the plate and parked it 435 feet away in the RF bleachers. That, more than the final score itself, is what I’ll likely remember from that otherwise nondescript Tuesday evening of baseball.

Said dinger seems to be following a pretty distinct trend for the 2025 Reds, too, in that it was pulled. A quick check over at the batted ball data compiled by FanGraphs shows that at 45.0%, the Reds rank at the very top of pull-percentage across the league. And when you balance that with a 20.8% opposite-field rate that ranks as the second lowest in the league, it begins to tell a bit of a tale that the Reds are, by all accounts, likely trying to pull the ball more often than any other team out there.

That’s probably not a bad thing, either.

A quick glance at the leaderboard of the individual players who pull the ball most often reveals something of a who’s who of mashers within the game. Byron Buxton has been on an absolute heater in May (1.027 OPS) and he ranks second overall at 57.7%, just slightly ahead of star Alex Bregman (57.0%) up in Boston. Cal Raleigh (56.2%) has bonked 13 homers already while the likes of Jose Altuve (55.6%), Shohei Ohtani (54.9%), and Kyle Schwarber (51.8%) all fall within the top 15 among qualified hitters.

TJ Friedl, the highest Red on the list, checks in with 54.6% - right behind Ohtani.

In a vacuum, that’s probably a cool and good thing. It’s not a coincidence that many of the game’s most potent power hitters all tend to pull the ball more often, too - tapping into ‘pull power’ has long been a thing, after all. Where that could end up a problem for the Reds, though, is when ‘pulling’ the ball doesn’t correlate with ‘elevating’ the ball, too.

Or with hitting the ball hard.

Right now, the Reds rank just 25th in hard-hit rate (28.9%) according to FanGraphs, and that’s paired with a 45.5% groundball rate that ranks as the 5th highest. In other words, a lot of their pulled balls in play are going as weakly hit grounders on which they’ve basically rolled over softly. That, I’d wager, is not what they’re trying to do even though it’s what we’ve seen more often than we’d all like through the first quarter of the season.

It will be interesting to see just how this evolves over the course of 2025 as the Reds gradual begin to welcome back bats that have already missed (or are currently missing) serious time due to injuries. Will the reintroductions of Jeimer Candelario, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and Austin Hays tweak this as they pile up PAs? Will two of those dudes even make it back into the regular rotation of the Reds this season at all?

Will any of them actually, y’know, hit the ball into the GABP stands, for once?