Cincinnati Reds meet daily to leverage best-in-MLB team speed, then use it to beat Cards

ST. LOUIS — With two out in the second inning, Cincinnati Reds left fielder Stuart Fairchild beat out an infield single Saturday against the St. Louis Cardinals and starter Miles Mikolas.

It didn’t look like much in the moment. Except that the ball was hit to Nolan Arenado, the best third baseman of his generation. And that it loaded the bases.

But then four pitches later, catcher Luke Maile followed with a double to left, and Fairchild scored all the way from first.

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And just like that the Reds led 3-0 — on the way to an 8-4 victory in the second game of a nine-game road trip.

“Butterfly effect and everything,” Maile said of Fairchild’s leg hit. “It changed the game.”

Even before the game, manager David Bell looked over a lineup that returned speedy leadoff man TJ Friedl to the top of the order.

“I don’t know this, but how (do) we compare to any other team in baseball as far as just the speed at the top of the lineup — not just one or two, but one through five or six,” Bell said. “Guys either run really well or above average or have the ability to steal bases.”

A few hours later the Reds leveraged that uncommon team speed in a big scoring effort to back rookie left-hander Andrew Abbott (2-0) and beat a Cardinals team that out-homered them 2-0.

"It's a big part of our game because of the kind of offense we have," Bell said.

As for the answer to the question he raised, the Reds do, indeed, seem to be the fastest team in baseball, top to bottom.

They have 12 players on the roster rated with above-average sprint speed, according to Baseballsavant.com, including the new fastest guy in the league, fifth-day big-leaguer Elly De La Cruz.

When they activated leadoff man TJ Friedl from the injured list Saturday, the top five in the Reds order ranked 79, 43, 183, 1 and 108 among the 485 MLB players with at least five sprints to measure — all above average. In addition to that, Will Benson in the seven hole and Fairchild batting eighth, ranked 63 and 33, respectively.

The Reds are tied for most players (six) in baseball ranked among the top 79 — and for most (four) among the top 43 (also No. 39 TJ Hopkins. The Milwaukee Brewers are the other team in both cases.

It’s almost enough to make a team consider holding regular base running meetings to try to maximize that big advantage.

“We’ve been doing that for a few weeks now,” Bell said, “just a base running meeting every day.”

Wait. What? Every day?

Nobody does that.

“It’s not mandatory, but we go over the day’s pitcher,” Bell said. “We do it at the beginning of the series and go through all the relievers and then go through the starter that day.”

They get such a buy-in that even in the morning Saturday after a night game Friday, players collected teammates from the clubhouse to gather in a nearby room for the day’s meeting.

“They like it,” Bell said. “If they didn’t like it, we would probably get rid of it. A meeting every day is a lot. But it’s worked out.”

Whether it had anything to do directly with Saturday’s results, the team speed that runs through the roster like water through a fire hose was on display in every scoring rally.

That included Matt McLain, the aforementioned 43rd fastest guy in baseball, leading off the third with a triple that missed being an inside-the-park home run by the margin of the 30 or so feet it took McLain to realize his drive to left got past the diving left fielder and was rolling to the wall.

He wound up scoring the first of two runs that inning.

And in the seventh with Jonathan India at second and De La Cruz at first, Spencer Steer drove a double through the right-field gap that — thanks largely to that fastest guy in baseball — drove in both runners.

Cruz moved so fast around the bases he was within about 40 feet of catching India by the time that India — also in the above-average club — crossed the plate.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati Reds take fast lane to victory over St. Louis Cardinals