What’s the 2023 Reds best case scenario? Eno Sarris weighs in

Ideally, the thought of pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training is met with great optimism. The failures of the past are behind a team and everyone hopes this year will be different. Well, this year will be different, but there’s not much optimism in the Queen City that the 2023 Reds will be any better than the 2022 Reds, just … different.

In 2022, the Reds lost 100 games for just the second time in franchise history. Not only that, their best starting pitcher and best hitter were traded during the season and the cost-cutting by ownership continued. It’s easy to find reasons to be pessimistic about the 2023 Reds and, well, nobody’s going to doubt the logic of that stance.

But — and hang with us here — but, what fun is pessimism? You get to say ‘I told you so?’ if the Reds aren’t good? Well, you’ll hardly be alone. Projection systems have the Reds as one of baseball’s worst teams. That said, projection systems are just that — projections made before any games are played. 

Funny thing, though, there are ways to move the slider on those projections. And that’s where this article begins. I (Trent) asked my brilliant colleague (Eno) if there was a way to find out what the best-case scenario for the Reds would be in this coming season. 

Always up for a challenge, the brilliant member of this co-bylined duo (not Trent), went to work.

So, what did Eno come back with? Well, it’s easier for me (Trent) just to pass along what he had to say.

Sarris: Figuring out how good the Redscould be while remaining rooted in reality, is a tough — but not impossible — task. We have projections that tell us what the median outcome will be for the Reds, the ones that say they’re likely to win 67 games and be one of the worst five teams in baseball. Those are going to keep us reasonable, but those aren’t any fun.

But projections also have a spread; they can tell you what the best outcomes for each player would look like. Dan Szymborski’s ZiPs projections have percentiles so that we can easily see what an 80th percentile outcome would look like for a player. Certain collections of skills contain more volatility inherently — in other words, a big strikeout, medium walk, big power prospect like Elly De La Cruz might project to be around league average with the bat overall, but if he figures out how to reliably get to that power in the big leagues, his top-end outcomes are scintillating. ZiPs says he could hit .286 with a .325 OBP and .494 slugging in his 80th percentiles, and no shortstop in baseball slugged higher than .470 last season.

So, what would the Reds look like if their players all hit their 80th percentiles?

In this universe, the Reds win 95 games.

In this universe, Spencer Steer is a top-ten third baseman with mid-twenties homers and an OBP near .350, De La Cruz comes up and becomes one of the big league’s most powerful shortstops immediately, Wil Myers has a renaissance in the corner, and the Reds have eight hitters that are average or better by WAR. That doesn’t even count Votto, who comes up short of two wins even with a nice projection, mostly because he’s in the spreadsheet for 420 plate appearances after his shoulder surgery.

In this universe, the young studs in the rotation would be even better than WAR makes it seem, because these numbers are still tied to their innings and plate appearances projections. In other words, Hunter Greene’s three-win projection seems pretty good, but it’s only in 129 innings. If he’s that good, and remains healthy, he’s likely to put up more innings. If he threw 175 innings next year at his 80th percentile outcomes, he’d accrue 4.2 wins and be a top fifteen starter in the big leagues. It’s actually kind of easy to see the top end of this pitching staff coming together quickly, as Greene, Nick Lodolo, and Graham Ashcroft all throw hard with good secondaries.

But once you get into that bullpen, you start to see how this method has flaws. Last year, 26 pitchers put together 1.5 WAR as relievers across all of baseball. In the 80th percentiles listed here, the Reds would have three or four on one team. That’s just not possible. All of that production all adds up to around nine wins, which would be the second-best bullpen of the free agency era. Even the rosiest-colored glasses don’t produce the second-best bullpen of all time out of this Reds squad.

A projection quirk like this happens because at the top end for any one reliever is an outcome where they are the closer and get all the high-leverage opportunities, and that leads to more WAR. But that outcome can really only happen for one pitcher on any given team. If you account for the fact that these pitchers are all on one team and only one can be the closer, and soften the projections for every reliever not named Alexis Díaz, then you have to shave three and a half to four wins off that projected win total.

If we add up all the projected playing time for these players (taken from Szymborski’s post about projecting the Reds), you’ll also notice that they are around 300 plate appearances and 400 innings short of a full season. Even for the best teams, those last bits of playing time are soaked up by up-and-down types, which often carry with them production that’s below replacement. Looking at past trends, even for good teams (the Braves lost 4.9 wins to negative production, and the Astros lost 3.4 wins), it looks like we should take four wins off the top of this projection due to what will happen when the kids come up and round out the playing time.

Add it all up this way, and you get a top-end 87-win projection for Cincinnati. Time to check our math with Dan Szymborski!

“The ZiPS 80th percentile win record is 85-77 for the Reds,” he said.

The National League pennant winner won 87 regular season games. Huh.

So, what did I (Hi, it’s me Trent again!) take out of this? Man, those numbers really, really like Steer. That’s good. He could be the team’s everyday third baseman.

If Myers has a 2.8 WAR season, he’s likely putting up some of that outside of Great American Ball Park, because that would mean he’s playing well enough to be traded at the deadline to a team that sees a resurgent talent.

And then there’s De La Cruz. If there’s optimism surrounding anything with the Reds right now, it’s the sheer existence of De La Cruz, a true unicorn of the game. De La Cruz’s minor-league exploits are already the stuff of legend, even if he just turned 21 and has played a grand total of 47 games above Double A. There is a world where De La Cruz starts the season in Cincinnati, just as there’s apparently a multiverse world where the 2023 Reds as currently constituted win 85 games. I’m not betting on either, but I’m not going to say it’s impossible. Expect De La Cruz to begin the season again at Double A, find his way to Louisville rather quickly and end his season in Cincinnati. One veteran of player development said he believed De La Cruz would’ve been the best player on the Reds had he been called up last season. The gangly shortstop isn’t a finished product, but the talent is immense. A nearly three-win season could put him in the Rookie of the Year discussion, but it also assumes he plays enough at the big-league level.

I don’t think anyone would balk at the rotation of Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo and Graham Ashcraft putting up these 80-percentile performances and it would certainly help sell the hope of 2024. 

Will all of this happen? Probably not. But it’s January, when we must comfort ourselves with warm thoughts — because what else is there to do?

(Top photo of Greene: Justin Berl / Getty Images)