Reds clarify Elly's injury as partial quad strain
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CINCINNATI -- On Thursday, Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall clarified comments he made the previous night about shortstop Elly De La Cruz's left quadriceps injury.
Krall referred to De La Cruz’s injury as a “partial tear” of his quadriceps on the Reds Hot Stove League radio program, which set off some buzz.
“It was a left quad strain, which is a partial tear,” Krall said on Thursday, while noting that he inadvertently made the injury sound more serious than intended.
Medical websites do define a strain as a partial tear of a muscle. Either way, the injury nagged De La Cruz throughout the season but it was not severe enough to warrant sitting out.
Krall said this on the radio Wednesday:
"If you look at his year last year -- and I think a lot of people don't know this -- at the end of the year, like toward the end of July, he was dealing with a partial torn quad," Krall said. "And he has been rehabbing -- he was at the ballpark today -- he's been rehabbing this whole offseason.
• What could 2026 hold for Elly? More days off? Positional changes?
"To his credit, he played every day. He tried to grind through it. He tried to play through it. If you look at his defensive numbers, he made 12 errors through roughly toward the end of July when he got hurt. And then he made 14 from the end of July on. He was trying to play through it, but he wasn't able to do it as successful as possible."
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De La Cruz's range at short diminished dramatically last season after he ranked fifth among shortstops with +14 outs above average in 2024, according to Statcast. In 2025, though, he produced -3 OAA. His power numbers also dropped precipitously over the final two months of the season -- slugging .319 in August and .370 in September, his two lowest slugging percentages of any month in 2025.
Looking ahead to 2026, the hope is that De La Cruz will be fully healthy entering Spring Training and back to his upward trajectory.
"I do think that you look at where he was up until that point where he got hurt, and he was definitely better defensively," Krall said. "He just didn't finish the way he started."