​TORONTO, CANADA – SEPTEMBER 25: Elly De La Cruz #44 of the Cincinnati Reds steals his 30th base of the season against the Toronto Blue Jays during the third inning in their MLB game at the Rogers Centre on September 25, 2026 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo by Mark Blinch/Getty Images) | Getty Images On the final day of the Major League Baseball regular season in 2026 the Cincinnati Reds got to play the heel for a future Hall of Famer, one who may well have thrown his last big league pitch against them. They even made him look like his old self even though that had rarely been seen through his latest injury-plagued year.Max Scherzer buzzed balls past Cincinnati batters into the 8th inning, fanning 7 in a turn back the clock outing that saw him inch just behind Justin Verlander on the all-time strikeout list. The veteran Toronto Blue Jays righty threw 114 pitches in an era where only he and Verlander still remember starting pitchers doing such things, and Toronto’s offense (5 runs) was more than enough to back him in a 5-1 Blue Jay victory.It tied a bow on a horribly disappointing season for both clubs, who’ll each miss the playoffs.For the Reds, they’ll finish in last place in the NL Central with a 75-87 record. Sal Stewart slumped to the finish line so badly over the last two weeks that a) he didn’t end up leading the league in RBI and b) someone else will likely win the National League Rookie of the Year Award – the latter dinging the Reds future given the draft pick compensation (and bonus pool money) that comes with winning these days.Elly De La Cruz crossed into the 30-30 threshold just barely, and heads into arbitration on the heels of his best overall season. He’s suddenly going to be incredibly not-cheap anymore, and that paired with dwindling team control and Cincinnati’s frugality means we get our first real taste of how the Reds will attempt to build around a star that’s actually making more than league-minimum.Hunter Greene effectively missed all of this year, and he’ll effectively – if not definitively – miss all of next year. Don’t let the length of his absence go unmentioned when recapping just how far into the depths this franchise has fallen.A non-descript, straightforward loss on Sunday is pretty much the most apropo way this season could possibly conclude. This team was bad, not in an epic sense but in a ‘line up with 10 men across from a side with 11 and try to run the ball’ sort of way. They have a couple very talented players but not nearly enough mediocre players, the purely awful among them more than enough to overcompensate for the brilliance of the few.Their pitching staff at the start of the day was the second-worst by expected ERA. By the time the dust settles and today’s offensive marks are tallied, they might finish with the worst wRC+ offensively (the entered the day at 91, which was in a three-way tie for worst). They ranked among the very worst teams in several defensive statistics