2024 Team Previews: Cincinnati Reds
Going through all 30 teams, looking back at 2023 and ahead to the 2024 season through a fantasy baseball lens.
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Introduction & Links to All Teams Here
Reds Intro
What a difference a year can make! The Reds were one of the least interesting teams in fantasy land for a few years prior to this one, and now they’re near the top of the league in terms of the number of players we need to be aware of.
They brought up seemingly their entire top prospect list last year, and almost all of them did enough to be drafted in standard leagues in 2024. They have a lineup full of guys that should be drafted in the top 300, and in fact they can’t even fit all their competent hitters in a nine-man lineup. This is a good offense.
One year ago, we were mostly talking about the two young pitchers with the Reds - Greene and Lodolo. It was not a good 2023 season for that duo. Greene missed time and wasn’t exactly dominant when on the mound, and Lodolo missed almost the entire season with a spell of injuries.
The rotation is certainly not among the worst in the league anymore, but given the uncertainty at the top and the ugliness at the bottom, nobody is going to rank the pitching staff near the top of the league.
The important lesson to learn from the Reds 2023-2024 situations concern the highly touted prospects. Everybody wants the shiny new toy, people go absolutely nuts to grab these minor league studs when they’re called up. I mean in these NFBC FAAB leagues, dudes blew their entire remaining budgets for Elly in early June. You really couldn’t get a reasonable price on any prospect call-up, they all would go for way more than was justified, and almost all of them failed to live up to that price.
You would think that guys putting down hundreds/thousands of dollars a year in fantasy baseball would know that a dude with a 30% minor league strikeout rate simply cannot lower that in his first go-around in the Majors - it just doesn’t work like that. If you’re at 31% in the minors, that’s going to get worse in the Majors. How many players are really valuable for fantasy while striking out that much? It’s so, so thin - don’t short-term invest in minor leaguers with strikeout problems, just don’t do it.
Temper your expectations with rookies, and then after you do that - temper them again. Double-temper, triple-temper that shit. And don’t spend FAAB money on them, you’ll be much better off just using your money slowly on the boring but useful players.
Anyways, we have a lot to talk about.
Hitters
Elly De La Cruz
Age: 22
Pos: 3B/SS
Elly will always have a special place in my heart. On the day of his call-up, I tweeted out what my projection model thought he would do in the short-term, and it wasn’t pretty. I projected something like a 33% K%, a 7% BB%, and a lower barrel rate - and then said he was most similar to Jo Adell and Jose Siri. That’s when I learned how many… let’s say “passionate” Reds fans are on Twitter. I got dragged for days. And then like 9 days later he hit for the cycle and I got re-dragged. Then I made a joke about how his homer that night was only because Great American Ballpark was built by twelve year olds, and I got three-dragged for that one, although that one was deserved cause it was a much more legitimate homer than I thought.
You can tell these things stick with me. But after the weeks and months passed, my projection came to be stunningly accurate. The model misses a ton, but it was right on the money with Elly. The mature and wise thing for me to do would just have been to ignore it - to not try to get back at all those who took their shots at me. But I am a man born into the sinful nature of the world, so I took a few shots that were, of course, ignored. But it’s okay, I went ahead and made myself a trophy and hung it up in my office for being right.
The truth of the matter is that Elly was still a useful fantasy player because of the insane steal rate.
He ripped off 35 steals in 427 PAs and had one of the highest attempt rates in the league at 46%. When he was on first, he was running. The rest of the line left plenty to be desired:
427 PA, .235/.300/.410, .710 OPS, 13 HR, 67 R, 44 RBI
Everybody expected a high barrel rate from him given how hard he hits the ball, but there are two components to barrel rate - both equally important. There is launch velocity, and then there is launch angle. Elly struggled mightily to get the ball in the air:
And he had plenty of mishits, which lowered the average exit velo. All of that turned into a barrel rate of just 8.5%, right around the league average.
That does not fly well with a 34% K%. The BABIP was predictably high (.335), but it wasn’t enough to get the batting average near where we want it, and the bigger point is that his home run rate was below league average at 32.6 PA/HR. For someone with this kind of power playing in Cincinnati, we want a lot better than that.
An added note here, when he did get the ball in the air, he hit it harder than almost anybody. His 90th percentile EV on fly balls was 109.2, and that was in the 98th percentile.
And for all of the talk about how his discipline improved as the year went on, he hit just .200/.283/.359 with a 36.5 PA/HR, a 10% Brl%, a 35% K%, and a 58% GB% after August 1st- so he got worse in a lot of respects.
So what does 2024 hold? I have no idea. The smart thing to do, projection-wise, is to expect that he’ll improve in 2024. Getting four months of experience against big league pitching can only make him better, and you saw above that this kid will be a young 22 entering the 2024 season.
I’ve got him lowering the K% to 29% and lifting more balls, and that gives him a pretty useful projection. The issue is that (a) I’m not sure he’ll actually improve in strikeouts and batted ball stuff and (b) everybody is drafting him as if he’ll definitely improve massively in that. The guy has an early ADP of 21 in NFBC drafts, and to me that’s loopy.
Personally I kind of think my projection is optimistic, and even that still puts him as a $12 shortstop, which is below guys like Oneil Cruz and C.J. Abrams, and just a little bit above Dansby Swanson. Clearly, your boy JA isn’t going to draft this guy a single time. That’s a little bit scary given his tail outcome is like a 40-40 season with a .270 batting average, but whatever the PRICE is just TOO DAMN HIGH!
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Oneil Cruz, Anthony Volpe
JA Projection: 539 PA, 69 R, 22 HR, 73 RBI, 31 SB, .231/.301/.426, .726 OPS
Matt McLain
Age: 24
Pos: 2B/SS
McLain flew a little bit under the radar with Elly arriving around the same time, but he was a much better hitter:
403 PA, .290/.357/.507, .864 OPS, 16 HR, 65 R, 50 RBI, 14 SB
Very impressive stuff there especially given it was his first look at Major League pitching.
The rest of the good news is here:
10.8% Brl%, 40% GB%, 72% Contact%
Those numbers are all pretty good. But now, time for some bad news:
28.5 K%, .385 BABIP
That’s a much higher strikeout rate than you would have expected given the batting average and even in the contact rate, which was decent. He also had all kinds of good fortune on balls in play as you can see there with the BABIP.
So I’m downgrading expectations on McLain, it’s true that he’ll hit his homers (his power numbers are about average, but Great American Ballpark boosts that upward) and steal some bags:
He’s in the middle of the plot here as well:
The percentile graph shows that he doesn’t do anything fantastically well, but he isn’t overmatched anywhere either.
So McLain is a bit tough to project and rank as well. The floor would seem to be there with the homers and steals and the strikeout stuff that was more in control than Elly, but we’re certainly not past the point where we should be shocked if he busts in his second year. It’s still a small sample, he’s not an athletic stand-out, and he did strike out a lot as a rookie. He also has the benefit of being young and be entering into this second season with very valuable experience under his belt. I’m leaning more to being in on McLain than out, but I don’t think he’s a priority for me.
Comps/Rank-Arounds: Elly De La Cruz, Anthony Volpe
JA Projection: 622 PA, 93 R, 23 HR, 80 RBI, 19 SB, .267/.339/.468, .806 OPS
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