You are perpetually judged on results in the business of baseball. Wins are ultimately what matter to fans (and most owners), and flags fly forever. Chasing results, however, is an administrative tactic of the past.
Front offices, at least I hope, don’t go sign a guy because he had 112 RBI the season before. Even if he swatted 40 dingers the season before free agency, where he hit them, how far they went, and how many he’d ever hit in a season before that carry just as much weight in the evaluation now than simply staring at the back of one’s baseball card.
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So far in 2026, the results of the Cincinnati Reds offense are pretty poor. They own just a 90 wRC+ as a team, a mark good for just 26th out of the 30 MLB clubs. Their .220 batting average ranks dead last, their .306 OBP just 25th. There are 227 MLB players who have logged at least 110 PA so far, and the Reds have the guy with the single worst wRC+ mark (Ke’Bryan Hayes, 10), 14th worst (TJ Friedl, 51), and tied for 23rd worst (Tyler Stephenson, 66).
If you had never looked at the FanGraphs leaderboards, though, and simply cruised over to the team stats at Baseball Savant, you’d be shouting from the rooftops that this Cincinnati Reds offense has been built up as a powerhouse.
Only the New York Yankees (7.5%) have a better barrels per PA percentage than the Reds (7.2%). The team with Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, breakout star Ben Rice, Cody Bellinger, and Paul Goldschmidt…and then the Cincinnati Reds. Barrels, for those that aren’t familiar with the term, are effectively qualified on a rolling scale based on exit velocity and ideal launch angle, but are effectively a term that describes squaring a ball up, and only the Yankees do it with better frequency than the Reds so far this season.
It’s the same story for Brls/BBE%, or barrels per batted ball event – the Reds rank 2nd (11.2%) to only the Yankees (11.7%) in the rate in which they barrel the ball in plate appearances where the ball ends up in play.
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No team, and it’s not particularly close, has a higher average launch angle this season than the 17.5 degree mark posted by the Reds. In fact, dating back to the start of the 2021 season, no team in any season has posted a mark better than 16.1 degrees over the course of a season.
They rank 4th in launch angle sweet spot percentage. They rank 5th in maximum exit velocity, and 4th in average exit velocity. In other words, they’re hitting the ball square with more frequency than just about every team out there, hitting harder than almost every team out there, and hitting it with the highest average launch angle in recent memory – all hallmarks of a club that should be seeing line-drive lasers plastered all over every ball park in which they play.
Yet here they are sporting that lowly 90 wRC+ over a quarter of the way through the 2026 season.
What we get to ponder, for now, is which one of these begins to normalize and reveal itself as the true indicator of what this Reds club truly is. Will they continue to mash like this with middling results? Will the mashing produce better results? Is this offense actually even worse than it’s shown so far, and will it produce even worse results as the rate in which this club hits barrels sinks back down towards league average?
What we get to watch for the rest of the season is which one wins out, since for now, there’s a pretty clear divergence between process and results.
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