The fastest team of 2023 is now ...

The Reds are baseball’s fastest team. Let’s get to that part straight away: By Statcast metrics, they are baseball’s top collection of speedsters.

Not, of course, that this should come as a surprise. Every night one or another of them do something incredible on the bases -- need we remind you of the time that Elly De La Cruz beat out a ground ball to first base. They entered Tuesday with 87 steals, the second most in the game. If you can’t take your eyes off of this club right now, this is part of why, because they play an exciting, fast brand of baseball. If you try hard enough you can even paint their porous rotation as a positive here, since it gives them ample late-inning comeback opportunities.

It helps, though, when the numbers back up the eye test. Take the 30 teams, run them through Statcast’s sprint speed metric, weighed by playing time, and see what comes out. The Reds are there, at No. 1, exactly where you think they’d be. (For context, the MLB average sprint speed is 27 feet per second.)

But if the Reds being in that lofty spot right now isn’t all that surprising, what is notable is how far they’ve come from just one year ago, when they were last season's 23rd-fastest group -- or, if you prefer, eighth-slowest.

It’s not hard to see why: new players. If you can't make the players you have faster -- and, given the unending march of aging, you generally cannot -- then the only way to get faster is to turn over the roster. Last season, 11 qualified Reds posted below-average speed, and seven of them have since left the organization entirely, including noted non-speedsters Mike Moustakas, Colin Moran and Donovan Solano. Two more (Alejo López and Chuckie Robinson) are still with the team, but have spent all of this season with Triple-A Louisville. One of the remaining two, Joey Votto, missed most of the first half while rehabbing injury.

While Tyler Stephenson remains a regular lineup presence, and Votto will play more so long as he’s healthy, which will pull down the overall speed rating somewhat, the Reds essentially moved on from every other below-average runner.

As Reds general manager Nick Krall said to Jayson Stark of The Athletic recently: “We actually looked at this several years ago and said: We have to get more athletic. We’ve got to be better defenders. We’ve got to be better baserunners. And it’s going to be the biggest improvement we can make to our team.”

Indeed they did, and instead, this year’s Reds have De La Cruz, who has quickly surpassed previous contenders Bobby Witt Jr., Corbin Carroll and Trea Turner to claim the ever-changing title of “baseball’s fastest man.” They have rookie shortstop Matt McLain, who was promoted in May and has shown excellent speed despite only four stolen bases; they have Stuart Fairchild, who was claimed off waivers from the Giants last summer and is now the second-fastest runner on the Reds.

It’s that improvement that really stands out, because when we looked at this before the season, using playing time estimates from FanGraphs depth charts, we had the Phillies, Rays and Guardians ranking as the top three, and that mostly tracked -- they are currently three of the top four teams. We projected the six bottom teams to be the Mets, Rockies, Yankees, Red Sox, White Sox and Giants, and that's exactly what's happened, though in a slightly different ordering. Speed is consistent and doesn't really lend itself to flukes. It's not hard to project.

The Reds, however, were 10th, though they came with a special note: Which team added the most speed? That’s a tie between the A’s and Reds, who each added +0.5 ft/sec over last year’s ratings. Perhaps that’s not a surprise, since each are fielding quite young rosters. That they've gotten faster more quickly is part due to how much time Votto missed, and in part due to how quickly the rookies have made it to the Majors.

For all the focus on De La Cruz, it’s not just him. It’s the youth. Focusing exclusively on position players, not pitchers, look at how much younger Cincinnati has gotten since last year:

• 2022: 29.4 years average age, 5th-oldest
• 2023: 27.2 years average age, 5th-youngest

It’s fun to watch, for sure. But does it _matter_? One way to look at that is to give you a sneak peak at an upcoming Statcast metric that will evaluate players and teams on how effectively they take extra bases, excluding steals. (There should be a full leaderboard released at Baseball Savant over the All-Star break.) For each play, it can take into account factors such as the outfielder’s position and arm and the runner’s position and speed and assign (or demerit) value based on those decisions and whether they succeeded.

For example, this De La Cruz triple against the Dodgers appears as one of the highest-value baserunning plays of the year for Cincinnati, because plenty of runners wouldn’t have attempted to go for third, and among those who did, they wouldn’t all have had the speed to make it look this easy.

Put the value of all those plays together, factoring each fraction of run value per play into a seasonal aggregate, and what you’ll see soon is this -- which, for now, is mostly about where the Reds ranked last year, and where they rank this year. They were the worst last year. They're the best, so far, this year. (And remember, this is just taking extra bases; it's not even about all the steals.)

• 2022: -11 runs, 30th
• 2023: +6 runs, best

It matters.

The Reds, surprisingly, might be baseball’s most exciting team. They’re probably baseball’s most chaotic team, and we mean that in a good way, because it’s not exactly easy to win 12 games in a row despite a starting rotation that, on this very site, has been described as being in "dire straits." It's possible the pitching weakness might make 2023 "the year things began to turn," as opposed to "the year they made a deep playoff run." But whatever the Reds do this year, they're going to do it quickly. They're the fastest team around. The metrics match the eye test.