It doesn’t feel like it’s time for the 2026 ZiPS projections to be out yet, but when there are 30 teams and you space them out over the offseason then it means that you are going to start them at some point in November. Dan Szymborski, creator of ZiPS, released the projections for the Cincinnati Reds today – the 4th team that’s been released so far over at Fangraphs.
ZiPS seems to project the team as currently constructed in many of the ways the very commenters on this site (and just about everyone else alive) does. The starting rotation is good. The rest of the team needs a lot of work.
When looking at the position by position groups laid out in the article you can see the strength in the rotation quite easily. The opposite is true when you look at the group of position players. The average position player that’s considered “starter worthy” in MLB is roughly 2.0 WAR. For the Reds projections that barrier is crossed at just five of the nine positions. Only Elly De La Cruz and Matt McLain are at 3.0 WAR of higher (4.0 WAR is considered roughly All-Star level production). The bullpen isn’t bad, but it’s also not good.
The worst position on the field for Cincinnati comes over in right field. Noelvi Marte is the projected starter there and there’s a nod to Will Benson as the other guy who will see some action there. In total, their contribution is 0.1 WAR. And all of that and more is coming from Will Benson. The ZiPS projections really don’t think much of Marte. They project him to be a very poor fielder in right, and they don’t think he’s going to hit all that much, either, giving him a .252/.305/.396 line in 466 plate appearances. That’s significantly worse than he was in 2025. This is likely due to that disaster that was the 2024 season playing a role in the projections (which they should).
The Marte projection is the one that stands out the most. But just looking at the hitting for everyone on the team is just a game of starting out sad and then getting sadder the further down the list you go. Elly De La Cruz is the only hitter in the entire projection that has an OPS+ projection better than league average. Sal Stewart is right at the 100 mark – or league average. Everyone else is below there.
Moving back to the pitching, the projections show that the team certainly needs to add to the bullpen. ZiPS likes Graham Ashcraft the most among the returning group and projects him to be the lone reliever on the team with an ERA below 4.24. Tony Santillan is the only other returning reliever projected for an ERA below 4.50.
I always lean towards the side of “projection systems are always going to have ERA projections higher than any person would project a player to be” and that’s once again true here. Projecting Hunter Greene for a team best ERA of 3.55 just doesn’t add up given everything we’ve seen him do for the last two seasons and everything we know about him. So I would caution one to keep that in mind when looking at the projected ERA for everyone. Still, it’s very clear that the bullpen needs some help based on these projections.
It’s worth noting here, too, that the Reds projections are coming out before free agency as really started moving. There have been a few signings around the league, but only one of note. And while Cincinnati probably isn’t going to make a big splash, they probably aren’t going to sit around and do nothing. They are going to make some changes to the roster between now and the start of the 2026 season. And some of those changes will probably even improve the team.
With that said, right this second, the 2026 projections are the tiniest bit lower for the Cincinnati Reds than the 2025 projections were that came out in January of 2025. And that’s basically the conclusion that Szymborski notes before getting into what the projected stats are for the players, too.
As they are constructed right now, ZiPS sees the Reds about where they were in 2025: floating around .500. To control their own playoff fate, they’ll need ownership to invest more in the team. I’m not optimistic about that.
The front office didn’t exactly give fans too much to be optimistic about for all that long, either. Nick Krall, the team’s president of baseball operations told the local media that the payroll for 2026 would be about the same as it was in 2025. That has meant different things to different people, with some beat reporters suggesting that only leaves $15-20M for the club to spend in free agency if they don’t make any trades, with some others thinking that number is closer to $30M. Neither is a big chunk of change, but one of those numbers certainly goes further than the other.
