Good news!
The manner with which mainstream baseball media approaches the entire Qualifying Offer has long fascinated me. The legalese involved in the QO itself, the ramifications it has to each of the player, the team, and any other team out there interested in signing said player, all gets covered as if it’s some court-ordered diversion program or military conscription.
Nick Martinez expected to accept Qualifying Offer from Cincinnati Reds, serve one-year in their uniform before being released back into civilian life.
That’s the news here, by the way. BBWAA member and baseball writer Francys Romero reported over the weekend that Martinez is going to accept the Reds QO before Tuesday’s deadline, meaning he’ll return to the Reds for the 2025 season on a salary just north of $21 million and be a free agent at season’s end (barring any additional contract extensions).
Nick Martinez is accepting the Reds’ qualifying offer of $21.05M, per sources.
The final deadline to accept QO is Tuesday, November 19 (4 PM ET).
Martinez has a 3.31 ERA since returning from Japan in 2022 and was the NL Pitcher of the Month in September.
— Francys Romero (@francysromeroFR) November 17, 2024
I get the process. I get how much market-searching Martinez and agent Scott Boras had to do in a very tight window before Tuesday’s deadline, effectively gauging what would have been an entire offseason of potential interest from other teams in just about two weeks (and doing so knowing Martinez would have draft-pick connotations attached to him if he declined the QO and reached free agency). It’s complicated. It’s a delineation that’s important enough to distinguish it from other, more typical contract negotiations.
Surely Nick wishes he’d not been issued the QO and could have reached ‘free’ agency a much freer player than one with draft-pick hoopla surrounding him. He’d likely have landed a lucrative, multi-year deal – even one that kept him with Cincinnati, perhaps – and had a much longer period of time to think about it. From a pro-player perspective, it’s somewhat hard to stomach that he didn’t get that opportunity after such a stellar 2024 season.
From a pro-franchise perspective, it’s this kind of legalese that allows the Reds to get a small leg-up in player acquisition and retention against those clubs who willingly spend their money in said process. It gives them an angle to not be cheap, per se, but to avoid having to be forthright and decisive in a free agent world where all teams begin on equal footing. They didn’t have to outspend anyone to keep this great pitcher, they just had to dare anyone else to try to do it to them.
The Cincinnati Reds are going to sign Nick Martinez, who’d otherwise be a free agent, and he’s going to pitch for them in their uniform in what’s supposed to be a vital year for the direction of the oft-floundering franchise.
That’s what’s actually going to happen here. The Reds are gonna sign Nick Martinez again! That’s a good thing! It’s good news for us, the fans of this franchise, and we get to see this complicated QO process help the Reds land a pitcher that, if not a part of this series of administrative decisions, would likely have landed elsewhere for more money than the Reds were willing to spend.
Is it for a little bit more money out of the 2025 payroll than they’d like? Sure it is, but there was no method for them to both offer him less for the 2025 season and also guarantee that he’d ever pitch for them again. Letting Nick enter free agency without the ball and chain of draft pick loss for signing him means some team somewhere would’ve likely outbid the spendthrift Reds, and the end result of that scenario – cost aside – is them not getting a pitcher of his quality on their roster at all for next season.
For Martinez, he’ll have to settle for a one-year deal at just north of $21 million, a consolation prize as he enters his age-35 season when he surely hoped the cards would fall in a way that he’d land a multi-year deal that guaranteed him more than that. Cold comfort in the sense of the stratospheric amounts of money his peers get paid, but the reality is that any multi-year deal he signed wasn’t going to have an average annual value above $21 million. So, he gets this big, one-year pillow deal with hopes he can replicate his 2024 successes and enter free agency free from the draft-pick stigma again in a year and find that guarantee at that point.
Emotions and reactions from the player perspective now noted, the story is that the Reds are likely going to announce the signing of a really, really good pitcher in the next 24 hours. The Reds are going to sign Nick Martinez!