Gavin Lux’s August breakout has Reds fans wondering if it’s all smoke and mirrors

Gavin Lux's tenure with the Cincinnati Reds couldn't have gotten off to a better start. Through the first month of the 2025 campaign, the Lux hit .327/.416/.439 with a 140 wRC+. It was reminiscent of his days as a top prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers farm system.

Then, the calendar flipped to May, and the wheels fell off. Constantly swapping between left field, designated hitter, second base, the 27-year-old failed to post an OPS above .700 or a wRC+ above 100 in any month between May-July.

Just when all seemed lost, though, Lux is experiecing a resurgence during the month of August. Now partnered with the red-hot Miguel Andujar as the strong-side of the platoon at the DH spot, Lux is back to his early-season form, hitting .311/.333/.426 (107 wRC+) through 63 plate appearances this month. But can he sustain this resurgence to kickstart a run from the Reds in the final month of the season?

Gavin Lux’s August breakout has Reds fans wondering if it’s all smoke and mirrors

Even at his best, Lux has always needed some semblance of luck to succeed. With that blistering start to the season, he was working with a gargantuan .443 BABIP that was destined to regress to the mean. Once it did, we all saw what Lux without luck looks like.

However, to his credit, Lux's process was good in April. He walked in 13.3% of his plate appearances that month, lowered his ground-ball rate to 40.8%, and improved his hard-hit rate to 35.2%. All of those figures are single-month bests for Lux this season.

Juxtapose that to his current stretch of solid results, though, and it's hard not to get worried. Compared to April, Lux's walk rate has dropped by more than 10%, his strikeout rate has spiked by 4.7%, his ground-ball rate is up by 10.4%, and his hard-hit rate is down by five percent.

That's a lot of numbers to throw at you, but the point is: the stats do not back up the results. At all. He's barely walking, striking out more than a quarter of the time, and is rarely hitting the ball hard. You don't need to be a sabermetrics wiz to understand why it feels like a fool's errand to expect Lux to continue producing at this level without making some sort of change.

Naturally, Lux is getting by with another inflated BABIP number this month (.429), but this time he can't even claim to have earned some of that luck. It's true that the presence of Andujar has enabled him to exclusively play against right-handers -- which is rather important, considering his wRC+ against southpaws (33) is more than 80 points below his figure against righties (115) -- but favorable matchups do not explain away this much smoke and mirrors.

If the Reds are going to make a run at a Wild Card spot in September, they'll need the whole lineup to be clicking, Lux included. For that to be the case, though, he'll have to continue defying the numbers.

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