Buster Olney of ESPN released his top five most improved teams for 2025 today and at the very top of the list is the Cincinnati Reds. He likes the trade acquisitions the club made, and he’s a big fan of adding new manager Terry Francona to take over the club.
But before any of that, Olney points to the record for Cincinnati in 1-run games. In 2024 they went 15-28, which was the worst in Major League Baseball. Typically a team should be expected to be around .500 in such contests and past performance in those games isn’t predictive to future performance in those types of decisions. As Olney puts it – they are likely to get better merely by moving to the mean. If Cincinnati would have gone 21-22 in those games, for example, that would have had them above .500 on the season. Instead they didn’t and it led to the firing of their manager in the final week of the year and the hiring of Francona.
There was only one team with a winning record on Olney’s list – the Arizona Diamondbacks, who finished 89-73 last season but missed out on the playoffs. While not directly making the connection, Olney seems to point out some similarities between the Reds and Arizona from 2024 and why they could improve. A lack of performance from several players they expected to get much better production from – which in the Reds case could include any of Jeimer Candelario, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, Noelvi Marte, just about anyone who played in the outfield, and then pitchers like Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft.
Cincinnati doesn’t need all of those guys to top out in 2025 to be better, but getting good and expected production from them would certainly go a long way. But the Reds also missed the entire season of Matt McLain. He played at an All-Star level in his rookie season, and even if he’s not quite that good as he returns from a shoulder and rib injury that he dealt with in 2024, if he’s even sort of in that same ballpark it’s a big boost for the offense and probably a good boost to the defense, too.
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