The Reds beat the Cubs last night, bringing their record since April 17th to 15-12. Not exactly a massive sample size, and yes, they played seven of those games against the Giants, but over .500 by three games.
They won the game by two runs, bringing their run differential—over the whole season, not just since April 17th—to a positive 31, seventh-best in the MLB, ahead of the Brewers, Cardinals, and Phillies, to name a few playoff contenders. The Pythagorean Win-Loss formula—a basic, yet remarkably accurate way to predict a team’s winning percentage given that team’s runs scored and runs allowed—says they’ve played like a 26-18 team so far, a ratio that would translate to 96 wins over the course of the season. The gap between their actual winning percentage and their Pythagorean winning percentage is the largest in magnitude of any team the Pythagorean percentage pegs as better than their record indicates.
By Runs Allowed, FIP, and ERA, the Reds’ pitching staff has been the second-best in the league so far, over a quarter of the way through the season.
Yet FanGraphs and FiveThirtyEight put their playoff chances at 6.8% and 9%, respectively.
So what’s going on?
The obvious factor is the Reds’ 5-12 start to the season. They’re four games under .500, after all, and those eight straight losses between March 31st and April 7th may have been lethal, even if they came by fewer than two runs per game.
Their environment is also a factor. They play in a division with three playoff contenders, and their fourth neighbor—the Pirates—are over .500 as well. While their road trip to Los Angeles is out of the way, they have yet to play any of their combined 18 games at Miller Park and Wrigley Field, and they host the Astros for a three-game set in June. FanGraphs pegs their remaining schedule as the most difficult in the MLB.
Given the hole from which they’re starting, the quality of the teams against which they’re competing most directly in the standings, and the difficulty of their remaining path, the Reds’ poor playoff chances make sense. Even the Astros would have a tough hill to climb if placed in a similar environment.
But is it possible the Reds really are a good team?
Let’s start with their pitching, because it seems to be the driving force behind that strong Pythagorean percentage.
Five of the Reds’ six most valuable pitchers so far, by fWAR, are their starters. Of those, all but Luis Castillo possess a FIP lower than their ERA, but all five—including Castillo—are outperforming the expectations of projection systems like ZiPS and Steamer, which use metrics from players with similar histories to project future performance (PECOTA is a system similar to these). In other words, FIP projects positive regression for all but Castillo, while history indicates all five are outperforming their talent. Whether this historic difference is thanks to luck, good coaching (Derek Johnson, the pitching coach, is new this year, coming over after three years with the Brewers), or personal steps forward is unclear. It’s most likely a mix. But taken in total, it’s probably fair to say that the Reds’ starting pitching is good, though its overachievements so far may not be entirely sustainable.
Before we move on to the bullpen, I should note that it’s possible they’ll get former Dodger Alex Wood back from a back injury (Wood came over in the Yasiel Puig trade) within the next month or two. He wouldn’t be much of an upgrade over any of their current starters, but he’d certainly add some depth.
In the bullpen, there have been a number of pleasant surprises, similarly to the rotation. Amir Garrett, Michael Lorenzen, Robert Stephenson, and even Wandy Peralta are all having career-best years thus far, while Raisel Iglesias and David Hernandez provide significant value. Contrarily to how they diverge with regard to the rotation, FIP and history agree that the bullpen is likely to, as a whole, regress in a poor direction. But even with some regression, the Reds’ pitching staff has been so much better than the rest of the National League that it would take a lot for it to not be counted as a positive.
Defensively, it’s hard to say how good, exactly, the Reds are, in large part because defensive metrics are still changing rapidly as statisticians work to better understand how to quantify it. Their opponents’ BABIP is .294, close to average and close to what it’s been the last two years, which points to nothing outlandish on the defensive side of things, looking both backwards and forwards.
Offensively, BABIP indicates the Reds should be much better than their collective 81 wRC+. The Reds’ BABIP, which is currently .253, is worse than any team’s has been over a full season in the last 20 years (and possibly longer—I didn’t look any more once I got back to 1999). Even an increase in that to join the rest of the bottom of the league (the A’s have the next-worst, at .270) would translate into significantly more runs.
Joey Votto is 35 and in a slump, which is a troubling combination, but it’s hard to believe he won’t turn around his 84 wRC+ to something above average, unless he’s hurt—which sure seems possible given the cliff off of which his numbers have fallen. Yasiel Puig is having the worst year of his career by a wide margin, but his BABIP is an improbable .231. Derek Dietrich, Eugenio Suarez, and Jose Iglesias all might cool off a bit, but even so, it’s reasonable to expect the Reds’ offense to improve over the rest of the season, especially if they get Scooter Gennett back from his groin injury around the All-Star Break, which is the expectation.
Looking at all of this, the Reds look a lot closer to that 26-18 team the Pythagorean Win-Loss formula views them as than the last-place team they are so far. The hill to contention might be too high to climb, but with a very good pitching staff and a collection of adequate (on the aggregate) defenders certain to improve at the plate, the Reds should at the very least cause a lot of trouble for opponents between now and whenever they make the decision to sell or buy at the Trade Deadline. If they do sell, where they go from there is anybody’s guess, but for the time being, run differential isn’t lying: The Cincinnati Reds are a good baseball team.
