The Reds’ night in Chicago took a sharp turn when Elly De La Cruz left Sunday’s primetime game against the Cubs with what the team said on social media was an apparent injury to his left quad muscle.
De La Cruz had already given Cincinnati a productive night before heading out, going 2-for-4 with a double and a run scored. Once he exited, Matt McLain slid over to shortstop, and Ivan Johnson entered the game and took over at second base.
The concern goes well beyond one game. De La Cruz dealt with the same injury on the same leg for nearly the entire second half last season, and it showed in his production.
After blasting 18 home runs in the first half of 2025, he managed just four after the All-Star break. This year, the decline hasn’t been as severe, but the drop-off is still there: his batting average has fallen 13 points, and he has six home runs since the break.
That’s the kind of development Cincinnati cannot afford to keep repeating. De La Cruz is the centerpiece of the roster, the player the Reds need healthy if they’re going to build anything lasting while he remains under team control.
This is now the second straight season he has been bothered by the same injury, and it’s also the first time in his career that he has spent any time on the injured list. He missed nearly all of June after landing there with a hamstring injury.
The timing makes this feel especially brutal for a Reds season that has already gone off the rails. Cincinnati opened with real momentum, winning 20 games by the end of April, and people around the team were talking about the club as a possible division threat after its 2025 playoff run - the franchise’s first since 2020 - in the first year of Terry Francona’s regime.
But once May arrived, the bottom fell out. The bullpen went through one of its roughest stretches in recent memory, and the offense mostly lived and died with the home run. There were signs of life coming out of the All-Star break and at the end of July, but the trend has started to swing back toward the ugly baseball the Reds showed in May and June.
And now September looks even tougher. Cincinnati is set to face the Brewers and Dodgers twice apiece, plus matchups with the Cubs, Padres, Braves and Blue Jays. Every one of those clubs is either in a playoff spot or right in the thick of the race, which makes the Reds’ final month look as difficult as any stretch they’ve had in a long time.
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It also fits into a broader player-development picture for Cincinnati, with the club still sorting through the next wave in its Dominican Summer League and keeping an eye on prospects who could be headed stateside soon. For Vu, the assignment is less about a setback than a chance to rediscover the approach and production that pushed him forward in the first place, even if the road back to Double-A now looks a little longer. [Read more 🡒]