Chris Towers wrote this afternoon at CBS Sports about the second base position in 2025 from a fantasy baseball perspective. And one of the disappointments he wrote about was Matt McLain. While there are certain things that matter in real games that don’t matter in fantasy baseball (defense!), there are many things that matter in both games. And Towers points that out there were plenty of reasons that people should have been concerned about the Cincinnati Reds infielder entering the year.
Let’s first go back to 2023, when Matt McLain showed up in May after a good start at Triple-A Louisville and held on for the next four months before landing on the injured list and missing the final month of the year. When he was on the field in 2023, he was very good at the plate, hitting .290/.357/.507. That was good for a 127 OPS+, which essentially means that after adjusting for all the ballparks he played in during the season, his OPS was 27% better than league average.
We all know what happened in 2024 when McLain injured his shoulder in spring training, underwent surgery and then missed the entire year (a late-season injury to his rib cage halted his rehab in August. He was healthy enough to play in the Arizona Fall League after the MLB season ended).
With Matt McLain’s strong 203 season, there were a number of things that might make you think that without some underlying improvements he would struggle to repeat his success in 2025, completely ignoring the fact that he also had shoulder surgery.
The first was that McLain had a high strikeout rate. While that probably seems like the case for most hitters these days, McLain struck out 28.5% of the time he stepped to the plate. Among players with at least 400 plate appearances, they ranked 185th out of 212 players. You can strike out quite often and still be productive, but that almost always requires a player to both hit for a lot of power and walk a lot. McLain didn’t run much. However, he did hit for a fair amount of power.
The other big thing for McLain is that his BABIP was .385 (BABIP is the batting average of balls in play – home runs are not included, since those are not “in play” in the sense that anyone can catch them). That was the third-highest mark in MLB in 2023 among players with 400 plate appearances. While hitters have more control over their BABIP than pitchers, .385 is a mark that no one seems able to repeat on a routine basis. The league average rate today is around .290.
In 2025, McLain’s strikeout rate remained the same as he struck out 28.9% of the time he stepped to the plate. His strength, which unsurprisingly came from a shoulder injury, waned somewhat. And his BABIP also fell, dropping to .292 per year. His walk rate did increase slightly, but was only 9.5%.
The warning signs were there and they all played out. That doesn’t mean things can’t get better in 2026. It was noted above that hitters generally have more control over their BABIP than pitchers. There are a few reasons for this and one of those reasons is speed. Guys who are very fast tend to catch a few more infield hits than guys who are not. Matt McLain is very fast. Not only is his sprint speed at the top of the leaderboard, but he also gets out of the box quickly and gets to first base.
That speed played worse on infield hits in 2025 than it did two years ago. In 2023, he hit .158 on balls fielded by infielders, but that dropped to .128 in 2025. That would be about five more singles if he matched his 2023 average on those plays.
The bigger problem, however, was the decline of power. He simply didn’t hit the ball as hard and that probably had something to do with his lower BABIP, and of course much less slugging. Shoulder injuries are difficult to diagnose. Some guys have them and it takes them some time to recover and get back to normal, but they get there eventually. But some guys never get back to where they were before the injury. We don’t know where McLain will land on that scale. If he’s able to regain the power he showed as a rookie, things could look a lot better for him as a hitter, even if his BABIP doesn’t return to 2023’s .385.
What is quite clear, however, is that something or several things will have to improve about his profile if he wants to remain a starting second baseman in the major leagues. Whether that’s finding more power, making more contact, running more, finding a way to get his BABIP well above league average, or a combination of those things – something has to change.
Viewership was up for the Reds
The good news for the Cincinnati Reds is that many more people were watching their games in 2025 than in the past. There are plenty of reasons for that, but a lot of it is likely due to the fact that fans were able to stream the games directly through FanDuel Sports Network without the need for a cable/satellite/streaming service that offered the channel. In today’s era of cord-cutting and non-traditional “cable” bundles through other streaming services, which left many sports fans without their regional sports network, many fans were unable to tune in, but by 2025 they could pay for this option directly without bundling it with another $50+ “cable” bill.
More people were also watching more traditional television, but the gains there were much smaller (a 6% increase according to the Reds press release, compared to a 278% increase in the number of ‘streamers per game’).
It’s always good to have your product available to more people. And also easier to access. If people don’t have easy access to it, they learn to live without it and that is never what you want. 2025 was a big step forward for the fans, and ultimately that’s good for the Reds as it not only helps retain fans but also attract new ones. You need that in the long run.
Speaking of the long term, the Cincinnati Reds’ deal with FanDuel Sports Network was only for the 2025 season. Last November, the club announced that the 2025 season would be distributed and produced by Major League Baseball. It would be available from your local cable/satellite provider and available on a non-blackout streaming package. But two months later, those plans changed when the Reds went with FanDuel Sports Network.
While the press release was put out to talk about how successful it was for both sides in 2025, nothing at all was said about what would happen in 2026. There’s plenty of time to find out — spring training games won’t start until late February. But at this point, we also don’t really have any information about where fans will tune in to watch those games.
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