Brewers Keys to Beating the Cincinnati Reds This Weekend

After two series of interleague play to kick off the 2025 campaign, the Brewers will host the division rival Reds! After the bumpiest of starts to the season, the Brewers rallied from being swept to take two of three games and win the series against the Royals. The Reds will be looking to return to winning form, having not scored a run since Monday. Two teams with something to prove tangling in the same competitive division? Sounds like an electric early-season series to dig into. 

It’s been a limp decade-plus for the storied Cincinnati franchise, and it’s been a very long time since young upstart names like Joey Votto and Brandon Phillips would impose upon Milwaukee, with All-Star arms like Johnny Cueto and Aroldis Chapman to back them up. This year, though, the whispers of good things to come might be turning into shouts. Suddenly, the Queen City is laden with talent, ranging from elite to quietly solid. That young talent will be informed by the expertise of future Hall Of Fame manager Terry Francona, who emerged from semi-retirement to take the helm in Cincinnati. Tito’s return is so much more than just a nostalgic watermark to their season. It’s a highly respected stabilizing force that can mentor already brilliant talent and take it to the next level.

The 2-4 start for the Reds may not look like anything special, especially given that two of those L’s are on account of frustrating back-to-back shutouts at the hands of the Rangers. Examining those losses a bit closer however, you’ll notice they were both 1-0 games. Conversely, the first game of that series was a 14-3 shellacking by Cincy, proof that the Reds can flip the switch and put up crooked numbers in a hurry. The solidification of Cincinnati’s roster is exemplified in Elly De La Cruz, who followed an impressive 98-game rookie year with a history-making sophomore showing. In 2024, he authored a 20-homer, 60-stolen base season, surpassing 100 career stolen bags nearly a month before the season wrapped. A week into the season, he has more homers than stolen bases (two to one), but if he’s dialed his game even tighter, you could expect those numbers to race each other upward throughout the season. 

Another compelling infield storyline can be found in Matt McLain. McLain also impressed in his freshman year, arriving on the scene in 2023 at the age of 23 and putting up an impressive 3.6 WAR. Sadly, shoulder injuries sidelined the promising young player for the entire 2024 season and put reasonable skepticism as to what version of McLain would show up post-recovery.

Early signs are putting those doubts to rest. He’s already gone deep three times, and is hitting the ball hard, albeit sometimes into tough-luck outs. The latter is also true of new Red and native Wisconsinite Gavin Lux, who was acquired by the Reds after helping the Los Angeles Dodgers win it all last season. The balls Lux has put into play have found leather, but they are jumping off the bat at an average of 93.5 MPH. 

Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, what looked like a five-alarm inferno to start the series simmered into a controlled burn. The 11-1 beatdown they took to kick off their series against the Royals was followed by a resounding win (led by rookie Chad Patrick), then an exciting walk-off built by a Freddie Peralta gem and a Brice Turang squeeze bunt. What follows in the rotation, and what the Brewers will be putting up in their first intradivisional matchup, feel like the biggest question marks in their rotation. For those who have rightfully expunged it from their memory, Nestor Cortes began his tenure with the Brewers by giving up three home runs in as many pitches. Elvin Rodriguez figures to be next in line, filling the less desirable role of spot starter. There simply aren’t enough innings pitched by Rodriguez to provide any meaningful analysis on his game. That said, while it isn’t fair to place the blame exclusively on Rodriguez for how things turned out, the aforementioned Royals beatdown does have his fingerprints on it. 

Brewers Keys To Success

1. Be careful with Elly: Focusing so heavily on one player might seem overwrought, but what De La Cruz brings to the lineup isn’t just flashy star power. If he’s pitched directly, he’s liable to go yard, but if you walk him, he’ll Rickey Henderson his way around the diamond with ease. Early going indicates that he’s working on his discipline at the plate, but last year he was near the top of the league in whiff rate. If the Crew can find a way to exploit that weakness, it will make their days a lot easier. 

2. Cortes’s Redemption: How quickly we forget the bygone dominance of our ephemeral heroes! It seems pretty likely that Nasty Nestor’s days of flirting with acehood are behind us, but it was just last season that the lefty pitched to a reasonably good 3.77 ERA over a career-high 174 1/3 innings. Plus, there’s no way he can be as bad as he was in his last start…. Right? 

3. Keen Management: In a bit of good karma (perhaps unearned, since many Brewers fans indulged in a good deal of schadenfreude), Pat Murphy won the Manager Of The Year Award in his first year at the helm of the Brewers. This after years of it eluding the now-pariah Craig Counsell, who left Milwaukee to manage the dreaded Cubs. While it’s nice to have a skipper with such an accolade to their name, Francona has three of them. It will be a good early-season test for Murphy to galvanize his already stellar reputation if he can flash a little dugout mastery when the opportunity presents itself.