Stranger Things Have Happened: Reds vs. Dodgers NL Wild Card Preview

Reds fans, listen up. This isn’t so much a preview as it is a blueprint for how the Reds might upset the Dodgers – and let’s be real, it would be an upset, they’re the Dodgers. As for the Dodgers fans among you, don’t get too worked up. You’re surely reading this preview to figure out whether the Reds are going to upset the Dodgers, so this is just what you’re looking for too. And all you neutral fans? I’m pretty sure that if you’re reading this, it’s because you’re wondering whether the Reds can upset the Dodgers.

They can, obviously. It will just take a few carefully planned steps. Step one: get at least two great starts from your three starters. The Reds line up with Hunter Greene for Game 1, Nick Lodolo for Game 2, and Andrew Abbott for Game 3. Good starts in two of those games – say, two or fewer runs in six or more innings – will go along way towards keeping Cincinnati in range to strike. All three would be preferable, of course, but two feels like an absolute necessity given the uphill battle you’ll be reading about shortly.

Greene, of course, is the best chance for one of those aforementioned great starts. That’s just what he does now. He’s coming off a month of brilliance, and he shut down the Cubs’ sixth-ranked offense (110 aggregate wRC+) in a complete game shutout on September 18. The Dodgers’ second-ranked offense (113 aggregate wRC+) will be tougher to wrangle, but tougher is not the same as impossible or even improbable. If you made me pick one starter in all of baseball to win the next game, I’d pick… well, I’d pick Paul Skenes, and I’d probably go with Tarik Skubal next. But Greene would be in my top five, and so for our upset blueprint, let’s just count on him giving us a great game.

Lodolo and Abbott were both excellent this year as well. Lodolo took a step forward in 2025, largely by limiting walks and leaning more on his changeup against righties. He’s coming off one of his best starts of the season – 12 strikeouts in 6 1/3 scoreless innings against the Pirates – but he had an uneven month overall; before that start, the last time he’d finished six innings was in July. Abbott also had a breakout season, and like Lodolo, command had a lot to do with it. He too seemed to run out of gas down the stretch, with only one of his last seven starts going six or more innings. The Reds are probably going to need more innings – and a brilliant performance – out of one of those two.

Their obstacles in securing those prospective brilliant performances? Oh, just MVP’s row. There are methods for shutting down Los Angeles’ offense. Unfortunately, neither has been proven to work. Quite simply, though, you have to stop the Dodgers from walking, and you have to stop them from hitting home runs. They’re second in baseball in both home run rate and walk rate, and the two feed on each other in a virtuous cycle.

The top of the order is the crux of the challenge for the Reds’ upset bid. Shohei Ohtani, on his way to a third straight MVP award, doesn’t have many holes in his game. Theoretically, his swing is big enough that he can be beaten with high heat and diving hooks. In practice, our pitch-by-pitch data lists eight pitch types Ohtani has seen this season, and he’s been above average against all eight. Last year, he was above average against knuckleballs for good measure.

There’s plenty of room for hope on the Cincy side here, though. Greene’s fastball/slider/splitter attack against lefties is well-suited to facing Ohtani, and Lodolo’s angular delivery could give him fits; Ohtani has been merely great rather than transcendent against lefties in his illustrious career, and Lodolo is excellent against same-handed batters overall. Abbott has even more extreme splits than Lodolo. His sweeper, which he mostly eschews against righties, was one of the best lefty/lefty pitches in baseball this year, and he threw it a third of the time.

It doesn’t get much easier after Ohtani. Mookie Betts had a miserable first half of the season, but he hit his stride in September and seems to be fully healthy after a season-long struggle to recover from a nasty stomach bug. Freddie Freeman lurks behind him. The Dodgers platoon a decent amount, too, and they’ll hit Max Muncy cleanup against Greene and Teoscar Hernández against the lefties. In other words, the first half of the lineup is going to be absolutely terrifying every time through regardless of who’s pitching.

The good news is that they didn’t build the entire lineup out of MVPs. The Michael Conforto/Tommy Edman/Andy Pages/Ben Rortvedt bottom of the lineup isn’t the worst bottom of a lineup among any playoff team, but it doesn’t stand out in either direction the way the top half does. Survive the initial gauntlet, and you can handle the rest. On the other hand, let the bottom half of the lineup get on base, and you’ll have the best hitters in the world coming up with runners in scoring position (all the bases are in scoring position when the Dodgers are hitting). That is, to put it lightly, not where you want to be. Cincinnati’s road to an upset surely doesn’t involve a lot of production from Rortvedt, for example.

On the other hand, maybe production from Rortvedt won’t be an issue. He’s in the lineup because Will Smith, yet another elite bat, is on the shelf with a broken hand. I don’t expect Smith back for this series, but Dave Roberts hasn’t ruled it out. Still, that’s probably a mid-October concern, which benefits our upset plan here.

To be honest with you, the bottom of the lineup isn’t so forgiving to lefties. Edman and Pages both move up in the lineup against southpaws, and Muncy and Conforto depart for additional righty bats. That brings me to the next key for Cincy: the bullpen. There’s nothing too complicated here: Cincy has a bushel of righties, and it’s further bolstered by top prospect Chase Burns, temporarily in the ‘pen after an IL stint. If I were them, I’d be saving my very top leverage arms for the top half of the lineup and daring the Dodgers to go full platoon shuffle by bringing in mid-leverage righties against the bottom half.

Are these matchups good? I mean, no, not especially. It’s the freaking Dodgers. But if the Reds stick to the plan and get two long starts, those games will be eminently winnable. This goes without saying, but they’ll be all hands on deck in every game. I’m usually a fan of thinking holistically about the entire series and planning rest days around avoiding back-to-back appearances, but this is not a normal situation. Cincinnati is going to be a big underdog in every game. If they win the first one and have a sliver of a shot at the second, load management and playing for tomorrow should both go out the window.

Right, so that’s how I see the Reds slowing the Dodgers offense enough to give themselves a chance. Whether they take that chance comes down to the other side of the ball, where the Dodgers have a terrifying rotation of their own. Blake Snell will open the series, and he’s on some kind of run: 34 strikeouts in 24 innings in September en route to a 2.25 ERA. Yoshinobu Yamamoto basically pitched like that for the entire season, and if you thought Snell’s September as good, Yamamoto had 34 strikeouts of his own (27 innings) and a 0.67 ERA. Oh yeah – their third starter is that Ohtani guy, and his ERA in September was a flat zero. He even threw his longest start of the year, six innings, in his last outing. This is a steep hill to climb.

The Cincinnati offense starts and stops with Elly De La Cruz. Unfortunately, that led to a lot of stopping in the second half, because Elly was mired in a hellacious, injury-affected slump that briefly saw him dropped to seventh in the batting order. He’s rebounded since, but which De La Cruz we get in this series could go a long way towards determining the winner. Even playing in one of the homer-friendliest stadiums in the league, the Reds were 21st in home runs this year. The Dodgers’ top starters are so good that baserunners will be at a premium, which means hitting the ball over the wall is of vital importance, and De La Cruz has the light tower power to leave the yard at any time.

Behind De La Cruz (well, both in front of and behind, given that his spot in the lineup is a moving target), Spencer Steer and Tyler Stephenson look to me like additional sources of power. They’re both healthy and playing well, giving extra length to a lineup that has at times looked about three batters too short. I’d normally list Noelvi Marte here as well, and I suppose I am listing him, but while I’ve been impressed by his performance in right field as of late, he’s in a slump that makes Elly’s look mundane. He slashed .191/.214/.287 in September, and this isn’t some BABIP mirage; he struck out a third of the time and basically never walked. Marte is another guy who is capable of generating the homers Cincy needs, but I don’t like the matchup with L.A.’s power arms, which is why I highlighted some lower-in-the-order names first.

At the top of the order, TJ Friedl is the guy to watch. Friedl continues to be an underrated gem; he’s a center fielder with elite on-base skills, and he led the league in bunt hits to cement his spot in my heart. If the Reds do their part and hit some dingers this series, it will suddenly matter immensely whether Friedl can work a walk or drop down a perfect bunt to get driven in. Gavin Lux has a similar overall offensive profile to Friedl, on-base over power from the left side, though with more strikeouts, fewer walks, and none of those bunt hits. That’ll make his job harder than Friedl’s, but they’re both working towards the same goal – stand safely on a base while someone after them hits one out of Dodger Stadium, the best place in baseball for righties to hit home runs.

While some bolts of lightning from their boppers and free bases from their walkers would be helpful, the real work of the Reds offense is going to be to get those dang Dodgers starters off the mound. Did you see those ERAs? Did you see those names? That is not a rotation you want to tangle with. If the box scores for this series don’t feature many pitchers per game on the Los Angeles side, this isn’t going to end well for Cincinnati. The sooner that Snell, Yamamoto, and Ohtani are out of the game, the sooner the bullpen will get involved, and that’s where the Reds need to feast.

The Dodgers signed the top two relievers on the free agent market last winter. Unfortunately for them, Tanner Scott and Blake Treinen are part of the problem: Scott has been downright awful (4.74 ERA, 4.70 FIP) and Treinen has been even worse (5.40 ERA, 4.75 FIP, though in only 26 innings). Those are the relievers they went out and got on purpose! That duo and Alex Vesia drew the highest leverage assignments in September, with Vesia looking solid while Scott and Treinen melted down. Normally, that would make Vesia the closer, but things are never that simple for the ever-complicated Dodgers.

First, they might keep using their bullpen stars in big spots. Second, they have two incredibly heralded starting pitchers just cooling their heels and looking for something to do. Roki Sasaki, the Japanese phenom who has missed much of his rookie year with injury, made two appearances out of the bullpen in his return from the IL, and he basically looks like an elite closer already. He tops out in the triple digits, throws his mind-bending splitter about half the time, and leaves his sketchy slider on the sidelines. Two nice appearances don’t erase a disappointing season, and Sasaki’s fastball has looked extremely hittable throughout the year, but the extra velocity from relieving and a simplified pitch mix have me willing to believe that he’ll be a difference-maker. Is he L.A.’s best reliever? I’d say so if it weren’t for the paragraph you’re about to read.

Tyler Glasnow is also an option in the Dodger bullpen. That guy is a monster, one of the best pitchers in baseball when he’s healthy. He’s also the team’s fourth starter, and this series is only three games, so you can do the math. He hasn’t pitched out of the bullpen since he played in Pittsburgh seven years ago, but it’s not hard to imagine how it could turn out well. Again, he’s one of the best starters in baseball! I don’t even know how he’d simplify his pitch mix, because he throws four great pitches and uses them all roughly evenly, but who cares? I assume the Dodgers would prefer not to use him so that they can keep him fresh for a potential divisional series, but he’s too talented not to be an option if they need innings.

Another option, as if those guys weren’t enough, is Emmet Sheehan, who produced a 2.82 ERA this year and yet clearly has no spot in the postseason rotation. It’s wild to write that, but it’s just true; those top four starters are just ludicrous. In any case, that frees up Sheehan for multi-inning duty. Beyond him, Jack Dreyer got some looks in high-leverage spots and performed well. Justin Wrobleski looks sharp to me too. There are definitely plenty of strong options in this group. The real question is how Roberts balances out-of-form veterans, out-of-routine starters, and the workhorses of the regular season in coming up with a postseason deployment plan.

Is a Reds upset likely? Nope. Our ZiPS game-by-game odds, which I think are the best way to look at playoff predictions because of their granularity, give the Reds a one-in-three chance at a series win, with Greene’s start the only game where their odds are even 40%. That sounds right to me; despite a middling record, this Dodgers team is terrifying. But if that unexpected result does happen, I think it’ll be because they followed my blueprint. It’s easy. Just shut down their powerful lineup twice, have your ragtag squad chase their elite rotation out of the game, and then beat the mystery box that is the Dodger bullpen. Oh, and of course, then have your bullpen lock down two wins. Voila!