The Reds Are Making the Most of Their Chances

Seemingly every season, a baseball team scores noticeably more runs that we think they should. I’m not talking about teams that perform better than their preseason projections, but rather the teams that manage to score a lot more runs than their actual in-season numbers suggest they should. If we’re using the shorthand, I’m talking about teams who score more runs than their BaseRuns calculation supports.

Whenever you point this out regarding a specific team, you’re likely going to be met with skepticism. Some of that skepticism is very justified, as no single model (such as BaseRuns) can explain the real world perfectly. But some of the skepticism is less justified and devolves merely into a group of local fans suggesting that you don’t respect their team. At its core, this is usually going to be an argument about sequencing — or, as it’s sometimes known, clutch hitting. Is the team in question simply having a string of good timing or are they actually doing something to impact the order of their events?

History tells us that the answer is usually the former, but alternative hypotheses are always worth exploring. One of this season’s examples, the Reds, break the mold a bit. Instead of being a decent offense that’s scoring more than a decent number of runs, this year’s clutch kings are one of the worst offenses in baseball but are managing to look respectable given excellent timing.

Let’s begin by establishing the overall offensive performance of the Reds. Of the 30 teams, they rank 28th in wRC+ at 84 (27th in wOBA, if you remove the park and league adjustments).

The Reds are 20th in runs scored this season at 4.32 R/G and 26th using our BaseRuns estimate for runs scored at 4.05 R/G. In other words, their raw offensive numbers suggest they shouldn’t be scoring many runs, and they aren’t. But they ‘re definitely doing better than you would think if all you knew about them were those raw batting stats. And their base-running isn’t exceptional, either, so you can cross that possibility off the list.

To put this in perspective, a 0.27 R/G difference isn’t an extraordinary thing, but it might swing your opinion of a team three to five wins over the course of a season, all else equal. We’re not seeing a million articles written about the Reds this year because three to five wins means very little for a 43-63 team, but that doesn’t make the actual performance less interesting. It actually might make it more interesting, as we’ll see shortly.

As you have probably deduced, this is a story of timely hitting. Let’s get right to the numbers:

The numbers are presented in two forms: status of base-runners and leverage. The two forms tell essentially the same story. In situations in which hits would be particularly valuable, the Reds are performing well. In situations in which the bases are empty or the game doesn’t hang in the balance, they are terrible.

If you break it down by individual player, you can see a few of them are doing the heavy lifting.

Duvall, Suarez, Bruce, and Barnhart have performed dramatically better with men on base and in scoring position than with the bases empty. In fact, among qualified hitters, Bruce, Duvall, and Suarez all rank in the top 16 when it comes to difference between RISP wRC+ and bases-empty wRC+. Duvall, Suarez, and Bruce are doing it with more power, while Barnhart is doing it with more walks. Bruce and Barnhart can also thank higher BABIP.

If you’re in the business of supporting alternative hypotheses, this data doesn’t do much for you. Ideally, you’d want to see some type of consistent difference across all of the team’s players from one situation to another. You could imagine that a team had discovered some kind of new approach with men on base due to the way the defense is aligned or the way they’re being pitched. A cursory look shows that half the team’s regulars are driving this and they’re doing so in a variety of ways. Even if we wanted to put stock in a couple-hundred plate appearances for eight players, there’s not much here.

No one is going to take this observation as evidence that the Reds are a special offense, but they’re unusual in the sense that teams this bad overall typically haven’t hit anywhere close to this well with men in scoring position. The graph (current through Tuesday’s action) illustrates that point and allows us to discover something else.

The 2016 Mets are in a league of their own when it comes to overall performance versus performance with runners in scoring position. To give you an idea, the Reds are scoring about 0.6 R/G more than the Mets despite having a BaseRuns expected R/G roughly 0.1 R/G lower than the Mets. That the Mets are in the wild-card hunt despite so little production with men on base is something of a miracle. Perhaps trading for Jay Bruce was a desperate attempt to learn the Reds’ secrets.

It’s extremely unlikely that the Reds have hacked timely hitting anymore than the previous teams that have excelled in this area in years past, but it’s interesting that they’ve been the rare team in recent memory to hit well in the clutch despite being such a poor offense overall. My initial curiosity centered on that question. We’re so used to these kinds of things making decent teams look good, not terrible teams look decent. And at least over the last five years, my perception was accurate: this is an unusual event.

Unfortunately for the Reds, and very fortunately for the Mets, hitting with runners in scoring position (or on base) doesn’t seem to be a repeatable skill. There’s no reason to think any of this will continue for the final two months of the season, but the fact that it has happened the way it has to date remains interesting.