The Cincinnati Reds Winding Road To The Postseason

What a season 2025 was for the Cincinnati Reds and their followers! Every time it seemed like things had taken an irretrievable turn for the worse, the resilient Reds and fate conspired to bring them back, until the fates caught up with them in Los Angeles during the National League Wild Card series.

But hey! As I am typing these words, the Dodgers have also ousted the Phillies to move on to the NLCS. And to those who would minimize the Reds’ accomplishment in reaching the postseason the way they did, I say that 18 teams in MLB would have traded places with them. It is always better to be in the postseason than on the outside looking in. Some lessons can only be learned the hard way. Hopefully, those lessons learned by the 2025 Reds will be put to good use in the postseason starting next year.

Reds Positive Keys in 2025

We are going to summarize the road the Reds took to the postseason.

1. Consistency

In recent years, one of the knocks against the Reds was their inconsistency. It seemed like every time they managed to win four or five or even more games in a row, they’d turn around and post a matching or longer losing streak. This wasn’t the case for the 2025 Reds. Their longest winning and losing streaks were both just 5 games. On the positive side, they posted four 5 game winners and only one losing streak of that length.

2. Holding Their Own Versus Most Top Teams.

To those who would point out that the Reds 83 wins were one of the lowest totals to ever qualify for a wild card, please consider that the Reds won their season series against both the other two National League Wild Card qualifiers and their final two contenders for the third NL Wild Card. In fact, it was the season series win versus the Mets that ultimately got Cincinnati into the postseason. Along the way, they also split with a an NL division winner, the Phillies. Looking at the American League side, the Reds won their season series with three of the six postseason qualifiers, the Yankees, Tigers, and division-winning Guardians.

3. Avoiding Long Stretches Of Losing.

The Reds advanced all the way to late August before being swept in a series. When all was said and done, they were swept only twice all year, both times in a 3-game road series. This helped them avoid any truly long losing streaks and long stretches with a losing record, even if it didn’t always seem that way to us followers of the team.

Their four 5-game winning streaks were spread out, coming in late April, mid-May, early June, and mid-September. The Reds also had four additional 4-game winning streaks, including two in July. Together, these eight streaks spread across the season and encompassing 36 of their 83 wins helped to assure that long stretches of losing were avoided.

Tale Of The Tape

Let’s have a look at how the Reds did by month. The regular season is six months long with a few odd games at the beginning and/or end which can be added into the first or last month to give us a fairly balanced picture of the season’s flow.

Reds 2025 Wins by Month(Four March games included in April)MonthGamesWinsMonth Win%Year Total WinsYear Win %April3116.51616.516May2813.46429.492June2615.57744.518July2513.52057.518August2712.44469.504September2514.56083.512

The Reds struggled in May and August but avoided crashing in both months and made up the differences in June and September.

Here is a graphical look at the wildcard race showing the relative positions of the Reds and Mets to the last wild card spot, which I call the wild card bar. The waypoints here are intervals marking the Reds completion of 20% segments of their season.

What caught my eye on this graphical depiction is that the Reds were never cleanly above the bar until the last game of the season, and, conversely, all season long, the Mets were on or above the bar at every waypoint only to lose out on the tiebreaker at the end. Those of us who suffered with the Reds through their mini meltdown in 1999 (1-4 in their last 5 games) as New York raced up to tie the Reds on the last day of the season then take the wild card in a one-game playoff can finally feel exorcised of those demons!

Where the Reds Need To Improve

Obviously, the Reds don’t want to be sweating out the outcome of another team’s final game to learn whether their season has ended or they have advanced to the playoffs. As a team, where are the areas Cincinnati can find those additional ten to a dozen wins across a season to assure they are invited to the postseason?

1. Find A Way To Successfully Close Out Close Games

In 2025, the Reds had 40 comeback wins but also had 40 blown wins. This trend continued with 6 walkoff wins being matched by 6 walkoff losses. While there are certainly games that were both blown leads and walkoff losses, the Reds need to lower both these numbers by not letting games slip away late.

2. Figure Out A Better Strategy Extra Inning Games

While this category is closely related to the point above, the Reds extra inning record of 3-12 was so abysmal, it deserves to be called out on its own. Like it or not, the ghost runner in extra innings is a fact of life. Whatever the Reds grand strategy for extra innings was, it did not work. Throw it out. Assign someone to figure out what worked the best across MLB in extra innings and adapt accordingly.

3. The Front Office and ownership need to be more concerned with creating “peaks” and less concerned with the risk of “valleys” following peaks

We saw the large late season midweek attendance turnouts during the last week of 2025. Hopefully, the light will go on upstairs that if the Reds were seriously competing for the postseason, they could fill Great American Ball Park through the summer without the need for distracting postgame dog and pony shows.

And So, It Goes….

It was great to feel really excited and connected to Cincinnati Reds games in August and September such as I had not felt for too long. I was actually shaking my fist and calling out in delight in response to some of the big moments. I hope 2025 was just the start of something bigger and better for the team and its long suffering followers. That’s all from me for now.