As the season slowly and mercilessly winds down to an end, we can start to take a closer look at the one positive aspect of this Reds team: the offense. Other than a few lulls induced in part by injuries to key players, the bats showed up this year and continued to show steady improvement over the last few years.
I want to address what will become a very obvious trend throughout this post. Joey Votto had an incredible season last year and was nearly National League MVP. Jose Peraza was very, very bad. The single most predictable outcome was that Votto would decline and Peraza would improve in 2018, and that is exactly what happened.