Are the 2026 Cincinnati Reds being overlooked?
· Yahoo Sports
Up the river and around the bend, past Huntington and Parkersburg, Wheeling and Steubenville, the Pittsburgh Pirates finally have a little rumble in their bellies.
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Cincinnati’s NL Central rivals have Paul Skenes, ace extraordinaire, the reigning Cy Young Award winner in the National League. They have Konnor Griffin on the cusp of his debut, the consensus top overall prospect in the sport these days. They actually spent money on Ryan O’Hearn. They boast a starting rotation with both depth and youth, with Bubba Chandler firmly in the mix for Rookie of the Year honors if things go as planned.
Pittsburgh even turned the page on the Andrew McCutchen Era, letting their franchise icon walk in free agency down to Texas as they looked to move into a new, more forward-looking window in their team’s storied history. It’s enough to make you, me, and the baseball world think things might actually be on the up and up for them for the first time in a decade and a half.
Those are a series of storylines that make the Pirates something of the trendy dark horse pick in the Central this year, storylines that have many listing them ahead of the Cincinnati Reds in their projections for the division on the cusp of Opening Day. What Pittsburgh also gets to boast – which is undeniable – is that they’re rolling into Opening Day with a lot better health than the Reds, as Cincinnati’s ace sits on the sideline for the first three months of the year while recovering from yet another elbow surgery.
Pittsburgh right now seems to be very much in a similar place to where Cincinnati was just one year ago, a year that saw the Reds finally shake the cobwebs and sneak into the postseason via a Wild Card spot (albeit far behind the Milwaukee Brewers and Chicago Cubs within the Central). Clearly, or at least on paper, the Pirates not only have a better club this season than they did a year ago, but they also enter the season with tangible expectations for the first time in a generation, something that fuels their own bellies on a daily basis more than it did one year ago.
Expectations. Actually having a team, a front office, an owner, a fanbase that believes that there should be more wins in the that column at season’s end than losses. It’s something the Reds themselves couldn’t honestly claim for most of the last three decades, though it’s something they, too will have hanging over them as the 2026 season begins this week.
Has this group of Reds already peaked, though? Is it not outlandish to expect them to be even better this year than they were in 2025, what with Sal Stewart and Chase Burns and Rhett Lowder and Brandon Williamson all around from day one and Eugenio Suárez in the fold to sock dingers at a prolific rate? Isn’t Elly De La Cruz – a 2002 baby just like Skenes – still a player with infinitely more upside than we’ve seen so far?
It’s nice to finally look over at the Pirates and not move your thoughts completely past them. Pirates fans deserve that (and so, so much more). But it seems, at least right now, that the baseball world has their eyes focused on the newest shiny thing, and that thing is the Pirates talented new roster.
It seems, at least right now, that the Reds are being overlooked just a bit.
Ask manager Terry Francona and he’d probably tell you that’s exactly how he wants it. Wouldn’t anyone welcome the opportunity to maybe, just maybe, sneak up on teams for another season?
How long that narrative plays out remains to be seen. There’s a lot that remains to be seen from this Reds club, and that’s kind of my point – so much about this roster is still very much an unknown, which makes it odd that predictions (and most projections) have moved on from them already. How Stewart, Burns, and Lowder do in their first full seasons is a huge question mark. How the rotation holds with Greene on the sideline is another. How the dynamic between Suárez being back in town and former Pirate castoff Ke’Bryan Hayes being a glove-first 3B for a full year is handled rotationally is a huge unknown.
These Reds, despite sneaking in via the Wild Card a year ago, are still very, very much a wild card themselves. But if the things we think could go well – if the expectations placed on this group materialize after their 2025 run – we’re going to look back at all those 4th place predictions for the NL Central and have a very, very good chuckle.
Don’t sleep on the 2026 Cincinnati Reds.