Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball. This almost certainly works better for people like me—people who will calm themselves, on a crowded train platform or in a stormy emotional moment, by rotating the concept of a guy who hits .217 with 34 homers in their mind—than it does for Reds fans.
Recent Reds seasons each contain a high potency of Guys. Scott Schebler hit 30 homers for the Cincinnati Reds in 2017; he was done in the Majors by 2021, when he struck out in half of his 34 plate appearances with the Angels. Scooter Gennett and his Universal Baseball Association-ass name hit 27 homers for that team as well. Adam Duvall hit 31, Zack Cozart 24. They won 68 games. This is just what the Reds have been like: bad, loud, and weird. Duvall had a solid but bizarrely intermittent career; Schebler and Cozart were never good big-leaguers again, although they were both inevitably Angels before it was all over. By 2019, they had been replaced by another wave of Reds Guys. Yasiel Puig, already careening down the shoulder of his MLB career at age 28, hit 22 homers for the team that year. Derek Dietrich hit 19, and finished with a delectable .187/.328/.462 slash line. We used to make things in this country. That team won 75 games.
All of the above are Reds Guys. All teams converge toward the mean over time, and moving into the dinger-positive Great American Ball Park in 2003 made the Reds notably more like this by dint of that home stadium's dimensions. But it goes back further than that. Players who dodged the beefy turds of Marge Schott's untrained dogs at a previous Cincinnati ballpark—Glenn Braggs or Kal Daniels or whoever you like—are all part of the long lineage of players who mashed some taters to no great effect for otherwise unremarkable Reds teams. That they were all literally Reds guys does not diminish the extent to which they were, vibrationally speaking, Reds Guys. If Three True Outcomes icon Adam Dunn is something like the prototypical Reds Guy in terms of half-empty and mostly thwarted thump, he is also standing on the shoulders of giants with unsustainable swing-and-miss rates.
With all due respect to the dynastic Big Red Machine, the delightful 1990 World Series champions, some variably memorable Hall Of Very Good types, and current superfreak Elly De La Cruz, the Reds have been much better at stamping out new versions of a specific type of Guy than at anything else. It's a fun one to watch and remember. If I told you that a diesel guy named Rece Hinds hit five homers in his first six career games and two in the next 59, you would probably guess, correctly, that he did so for the Reds.
For the 2019 season, the definitive Reds Guy was Aristides Aquino. He took what seems likely to be his last Major League at-bat in 2022, and made only 762 plate appearances over a career that spanned five seasons. But if you remember the first three weeks of August in 2019, which represent the brief and historically loud peak of Aquino's career, it stuck with you. He would suit up for the Reds in parts of the next three seasons, and hit another 22 homers over those 187 games, but basically every memorable thing he did as a big leaguer happened over the course of 17 days that August. This was not a very good Reds team, but it was a delightfully noisy one. Their homer oafs knocked out sets of bicep curls in the dugout in their sleeveless uniforms; reliever Amir Garrett tweeted out his own highlights alongside the nauseated-face emoji, and at one point tried to fight everyone in the Pittsburgh Pirates dugout.
Aquino didn't arrive until the height of summer, but he was the most interesting player on the team. He hit seven homers in his first 10 games, which tied a Major League record; he hit his 10th in his 16th game, which set a new one, and then homered again the next day. Aquino's 14 homers over his first big-league month remain a National League record. He was very obviously on borrowed time, even during the implausible fortnight in which he was the best hitter in the sport. The 19 homers Aquino hit in those 225 giddy plate appearances were three fewer than he'd hit over his next, and almost certainly final, 536.
In 2016, Aquino's High-A hitting coach Gookie Dawkins told MiLB.com's Michael Avallone about the video work he'd done with the 22-year-old prospect immediately before he hit his fifth homer in six games. Dawkins showed Aquino that his hips had been "flying open pretty bad," and Aquino adjusted in a way that led him to raise his batting average nearly 100 points over six games.
"I saw him a little bit in Spring Training last year and I could tell then he was a strong guy," Dawkins said. "We've stressed to him to keep the mindset about just hitting line drives and not worry about the home run. With his strength and quick, line-drive swing, they'll come."
Dawkins was right that the homers would come; as became customary for Aquino, they also left. By the time Aquino made it to the Reds in August 2019, he had cycled through periods of pyrotechnic productiveness and long windy droughts of failure; he won the Chief Bender Award for the team's best minor-league hitter after the 2016 season, but had been removed from the team's 40-man roster by the end of 2018. When he made it to the Majors on Aug. 1, it was with a new wide-open setup that he'd adopted in spring training after rebooting his swing entirely. "People back home say my stance is really ugly," Aquino told MLB.com, the day after a game against the Cubs in which he hit homers in three consecutive innings. "But I hit the ball really well."
Aquino's production could not stay at that level more than anyone else's could. The Reds had enough doubts that they hired over him with free agent Nick Castellanos, who for all his other attributes was absolutely a dead-center, no-shit Reds Guy. Aquino would continue to tweak his approach in an attempt to become more selective about when he swung, and then he would give that all back when things got desperate. An approach that had always vibrated at an admirably and thrillingly violent frequency was never again in his control. When the Reds DFA'ed him in late April 2022, Aquino was hitting .049, with two hits and 24 strikeouts in his previous 41 plate appearances. He'd make it back to the Majors after clearing waivers—Aquino would, in fact, lead the league in outfield assists that year—and take a career-best 276 plate appearances for the Reds, but all of that only happened because the Reds are the Reds. Brandon Drury hit 20 homers for them in 92 games; the team went 62-100.
"A guy with his talent, it’s not a surprise at all that he had the success he had," Reds manager David Bell said after Aquino was DFA'ed in 2022. "But it’s not a surprise that any player would fall off either. It’s just so tough to get everything to work together."
Aquino struggled badly during a stint in Japan in 2023, but has spent the last three seasons in the Mexican League, where he has managed to keep things together against a lower level of competition. His team won the Serie Del Rey, the league's World Series, in each of his first two seasons there. He is on his third team in as many years there, and once again producing at an elite level. The current roster, like so many in the Mexican League, is rich in former big-leaguers who have either been squeezed out of the high minors or just chose to play their minor league ball in Veracruz or Quintana Roo instead of Indianapolis or Syracuse; one of Aquino's teammates in Oaxaca is Robert Dugger, against whom Aquino hit his 14th homer in 2019, which set a new NL rookie record for home runs in a calendar month.
If that is all a decently long way off now, it is also wild enough to remain vivid even as it recedes in the rearview. It's just so tough to get everything to work together, as the man said, and big league pitching exists to pry all those things apart. To have it all working in concert as Aquino did, if only for a little while, is much closer to miraculous than it might otherwise appear. This is what makes it memorable. "There’s scouting reports out now," Adam Wainwright said after giving up a homer to Aquino near the height of his ascent. "And as that goes, I don’t think he’ll hit 10 homers in every 16 games for the rest of his career. But it might be fun to watch."
