Thanks to a blazing hot past few weeks, general manager Nick Krall has the Cincinnati Reds as the talk of baseball. Krall stirred things with his decision to promote heralded rookie Elly De La Cruz, a decision that happened to coincide with the early stages of a 12-game winning streak.
Suddenly the Reds, picked by many to finish on the bottom of the pudding-soft NL Central, led their division.
Since that streak ended, three losses in their next five games have the Reds holding on tight in an effort to keep pace with the Milwaukee Brewers. The Reds have a lot of young offense, and the question around Cincinnati is whether Krall can stir up some pitching to match.
Grading the Cincinnati Reds at the midway point of the 2023 schedule
What follows is a mid-term assessment of Krall’s personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the Reds’ performance.
The standard of measurement in Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by Krall impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved (or worsened) the team’s status this season.
A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:
1. By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.
2. By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.
3. By the impact of players it signs at free agency or extends.
4. By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.
5. By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.
Here’s how Krall stacks up by those five yardsticks.