The Cincinnati Reds are coming off of a season in which they made the playoffs. It wasn’t exactly a good season as they finished 83-79, but in 2025 that was enough to be one of the best six teams in the National League. It wasn’t a bad season, but it also saw the club finish 14 games behind the 1st place Milwaukee Brewers in the division and seven games back of the 5th best team in the NL – the San Diego Padres.
With spring training set to start in less than two weeks, Dan Szymborski has published the first version of the ZiPS projections at Fangraphs for the 2026 standings. There are still free agents out there and there are still injuries that are going to happen and trades that will take place that can and will change the projections before the regular season begins. Still, this does give us a general idea of where teams stand in relation to each other, and for the Cincinnati Reds it’s not great.
ZiPs has the Reds in third place in the division, one game up on the St. Louis Cardinals, but eight games back of the Brewers and nine back of the Chicago Cubs. Their projected record? 78-84. That would be a little bit of a step backwards from where they finished in the first season under manager Terry Francona.
Last year the Reds certainly had some injuries that came into play. Every team has injuries they deal with, but Cincinnati saw some of their best players deal with issues throughout the year. Hunter Greene made just 19 starts on the year. Elly De La Cruz played in every game but his second half performance as he dealt with a tear in his quad was nothing at all like the previous season and a half from the All-Star shortstop. Chase Burns spent a month on the injured list (and didn’t join the team until the end of June). Tyler Stephenson spent more than a month on the injured list during the year between an oblique injury and a fractured thumb. And then there’s Rhett Lowder who missed the entire season.
Without doing much adding to the roster, and with the loss of several players to free agency you may be able to argue they didn’t improve the overall roster at all, Cincinnati once again finds itself in a situation where there is some upside to be a contending team but it likely will require very few injuries and the high-upside players to perform to that high upside if it’s going to happen. It usually doesn’t happen that way, but it’s also not unheard of.
In a perfect, or close to it scenario, the Reds could get healthy and big production out of their entire starting rotation and offensively from guys like De La Cruz, Tyler Stephenson, Matt McLain, Noelvi Marte, and Sal Stewart while the rest of the offense is solid. That team would probably be quite good and rack up plenty of wins. But the flip side of that is that there are some injuries and not everyone plays up to their “best” and the team hovers in that 75-80 win range where a few lucky or unlucky bounces make the difference between being bad and being ok-ish when it comes to the record of the club.
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