Entering 2025, Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz was coming off a tremendous season in which he hit 25 home runs and stole an MLB-leading 67 bases in his first full Major League campaign.
With his phenomenal five-tool potential, De La Cruz’s 2024 performance was seen as a potential stepping stone to even greater heights ahead for a player who was only entering his age-23 season. But things didn’t go the way he and the Reds hoped, and he took a step back, posting a .776 OPS and regressing defensively.
On Wednesday, we learned more about what was behind De La Cruz’s tough year. Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall joined the Reds Hot Stove podcast and said that De La Cruz, who appeared in all 162 games in 2025, was playing through a significant injury.
“If you look at his year last year — and I think a lot of people don’t know this — at the end of the year, like toward the end of July, he was dealing with a partial torn quad,” Krall said. “And he has been rehabbing — he was at the ballpark today — he’s been rehabbing this whole offseason.
“To his credit, he played every day. He tried to grind through it. He tried to play through it. If you look at his defensive numbers, he made 12 errors through roughly toward the end of July when he got hurt. And then he made 14 from the end of July on. He was trying to play through it, but he wasn’t able to do it as successful as possible.”
Looking ahead to 2026, the hope is that De La Cruz will be fully healthy entering Spring Training and back to his upward trajectory.
“I do think that you look at where he was up until that point where he got hurt, and he was definitely better defensively,” Krall said. “He just didn’t finish the way he started.”
