Elly De La Cruz carries Reds to series win over Tigers

He’s on a heater!

The Cincinnati Reds have won 7 of 9, sit a pair of games over the .500 mark at 37-35 so far in 2025, and just knocked off the Detroit Tigers by the score of 8-4 on Sunday afternoon in Comerica Park.

You can scour the box scores for every single specific reason the Reds have pulled off these things, or you can simply sigh and mumble Elly De La Cruz to yourselves.

Cincinnati’s superstar entered the month of June sporting a solid, yet un-Ellyesque .763 OPS for the entirety of the 2025 season, but he’s been on an absolute tear ever since. He owned a 1.219 OPS in June entering play on Sunday, a game in which he socked yet another 2-run homer as part of a 3-hit afternoon.

Dating back to May 25th, he’d hit a crazy .343/.443/.746 with 7 homers and 6 doubles over his last 19 games, and that was before today. After today’s exploits - including the fourth consecutive game in which he’s socked a homer - he’s up to .273/.352/.498 on the season, with 15 homers and 50 ribeyes as the behemoth in the middle of the Reds lineup.

With today’s victory, the Reds came back to take the series from Detroit after dropping the first game of it. That marks the first time in 39 such instances where they came back to win a series after dropping the first game of one, a simply remarkable run of performance that’s something of a mark of mediocrity for a franchise.

Elly’s on a heater. The Reds are on a heater. There’s a mighty fine chance this club finds a way to turn this season into something more than mediocrity after all.