On balance, it was a good season for the Reds in 2025. Hunter Greene replicated his excellent 2024 and made himself one of the game’s best young starters, Andrew Abbott enjoyed a career year that saw him make his first trip to the All-Star game, and despite winning just 83 games, the club managed to advance to the postseason for the first time in a full season since 2013.
That said, however, there are clear flaws in the team as currently constituted and it is not at all difficult to see where the team needs to improve if they hope to return to the play-offs next year for another bite of the apple. The Cincinnati offense has disappointed across the board this season, even at shortstop Elly Dela Cruz he hit 11 fewer extra-base hits and swiped 30 fewer bases than last year, despite similar on-base numbers.
In a season where virtually every part of the club’s attacking core has fallen short of expectations, it seems a little unfair to single out one player. Still, the second baseman struggles Matt McLain faces stand out from the crowd. McLain was one of the most exciting young players in baseball in 2023, as his sensational 89-game rookie season earned him a fifth-place finish in the NL Rookie of the Year voting that year. Unfortunately, he missed the entire 2024 season due to injuries and in some ways has looked like a shadow of his former self this season.
That doesn’t mean he deteriorated across the board. McLain’s 28.9% strikeout rate this season matched almost perfectly the 28.5% clip he posted in 2023. His 9.5% walk rate was actually a substantial improvement over the 7.7% he posted in his rookie campaign. His defense was also phenomenal, as he finished the year with +6 Fielding Run Value, a mark bettered by only eight qualified middle infielders in baseball this year. That’s a significant step up from the +1 FRV McLain offered in his rookie campaign.
Those are all positive (or, in the case of McLain’s strikeout rate, at least neutral) signs moving into 2023. However, it’s also when the good times come to an end. McLain’s power has diminished significantly over the past year by almost any metric. After hitting 16 home runs in 89 games as a rookie, he hit 15 in 147 games this year. His doubles also dropped from 23 to 18, while his triples actually dropped from four to zero. Hitting ten fewer extra base hits in 174 more at-bats is a drop in power that is nothing short of alarming, and McLain’s paltry .124 ISO placed him in the bottom 20 of qualified hitters this year. Its barrel price is down more than three points from 2023, and its hard-hit price is down almost two points.
That falls short even for some notorious contact-oriented hitters Junghoo Lee And Jacob Wilson. While those players (not to mention hitters with even less power, like Luis Arraez And Nico Hoerner) can get away with that minimum power thanks to elite bat-to-ball skills, but McLain’s lack of improvement in the strikeout department keeps him from being able to match that kind of hitting. Barring a massive drop in strikeouts next year, McLain will need to recapture some of that power if he wants to improve on this year’s paltry 77 wRC+, let alone approach the 129 wRC+ he posted in his rookie season.
How feasible is that actually? It’s hard to believe he’ll get all the way back to the level he reached in 2023, as that was helped in large part by a .385 BABIP. A BABIP of .350 is typically seen as around the upper end of the sustainable range from year to year, and McLain’s .292 BABIP this year falls firmly in that more sustainable range. It’s possible that it will go back up in the future, but reversing that 90-plus point drop seems like little more than a dream. However, getting back above league average seems like a much more reasonable ask, and one that could make McLain a key part of Cincinnati’s core again.
If he wants to get there, he’ll have to adjust his approach a bit. McLain’s hard-hit percentage was only marginally lower than his rookie season in 2025, but he lost more than a quarter of his barrels this season on a rate basis. Some of that can certainly be attributed to a sharp decline in the number of line drives. While McLain’s grounder rate stagnated at 38.7% between this year and 2023, his line drive rate dropped from 24.2% as a rookie to just 17.2% this year. To put these numbers in context, his line drive percentage ranked 132nd among 145 qualified hitters this year, while his 2023 percentage would have ranked eighth among that same group this year.
Returning to a more line drive-oriented approach could help McLain recoup some of those lost extra-base hits, and it would also help his plummeting BABIP. McLain hit 44.2% of his batted balls in the air this year, a top-30 clip in the majors. That works well for hitters like Aaron Judge And Kyle Schwarber who have the power to hit more than 40 home runs on an annual basis, but it’s a much less effective recipe for success for someone with McLain’s profile. He pulled the ball fewer times than all but 23 of the league’s qualified hitters this year, leaving him with a lot of catches and pop-ups but little production to show for it.
If McLain can lower his launch angle a bit next year, he could hit the sweet spot more often than he did this year. That was the secret ingredient that made McLain so effective in 2023, as his 39.6% sweet spot rate ranked in the 94th percentile among all MLB hitters. That dropped to just 34.0% this year, putting him in the 43rd percentile. The good news for McLain and the Reds is that a change in approach is much easier to correct than a step back in underlying skills, and McLain’s discipline, defense, speed and bat speed all appear to be right where they were in his rookie year or even better. That makes it relatively easy to imagine him re-emerging as a core part of the Reds lineup that will need to generate a lot more offense this year if they want to build on their cameo in the play-offs this season.
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