A pair of veterans were lopped off the roster yesterday.
With the wrist injury to TJ Friedl and the suspension of Noelvi Marte, the Cincinnati Reds will already be forced to put together an Opening Day roster that – to the offseason’s eyes – would look rather unorthodox. That’s your team’s leader in WAR from 2023 (and the regular leadoff man against both LHP and RHP) as well as one of the frontrunner’s to win Rookie of the Year, after all.
With their once-vaunted depth already tested, we’re now getting word that some of the players who’d been penciled-in for other positions are now going to be tasked with being more versatile, with Will Benson – once the guy we thought would be a regular corner OF – now looking like the strong-half of a platoon in CF.
Yesterday brought more clarity to the roster picture, too. Veteran utilityman (and Cincinnati native) Josh Harrison opted-out of his minors deal with the Reds when told he would not make the roster, while Tony Kemp – also a non-roster invitee – was reassigned to minor league camp. That’s not only over 6500 big league PA worth of experience out of the mix, but it’s also a pair of players versatile enough to cover almost every position on the diamond, something that, for a time, seemed like it would give them an edge towards the final roster spot given the unsettled nature of the rest of it.
Not so. Instead, it would appear that both Nick Martini and Mike Ford now have the inside track at the final roster spots, both players who are just about as 100% the inverse of ‘defensively versatile’ as it gets. Ford has never played anywhere other than 1B (and has more career starts as a DH than at 1B), while Martini is a bat-first LF who you’d prefer to use only as a DH at age-33.
Let’s assume the obvious at the rest of the positions real quick. Tyler Stephenson (1) and Luke Maile (2) will catch. Christian Encarnacion-Strand (3), Matt McLain (4), Elly De La Cruz (5), and Jeimer Candelario (6) will man the infield most days. Jonathan India (7) will attempt to show he’s as versatile as Spencer Steer was last year, while Spencer Steer (8) might end up just playing LF everyday. Will Benson (9) and Stuart Fairchild (10) will cover CF in Friedl’s absence, while Jake Fraley (11) will be firmly in the mix somewhere against RHP.
With the redundancy of Ford and Martini as left-handed bats with limited versatility obvious, it’s hard to think the Reds would simply fill their Opening Day roster with a pair of positionless defenders who both hit from the same side of the plate (even if Ford’s the owner of some odd reverse platoon splits in his pro career). In other words, it seems pretty clear that one of those guys will likely make the roster while the Reds – who still have a 40-man roster spot open, I believe – will almost certainly be shopping the bargain-bin for a player outside the organization who doesn’t make the cut for another team’s Opening Day roster.
That could be a guy like Jake Marisnick, who seems destined to miss out on the Los Angeles Angels Opening Day roster and has an opt-out of his own tomorrow. If it’s not him, it will certainly be someone who more adequately fits the profile of ‘defense-first,’ a guy who’s roughly the inverse of whichever of Martini/Ford the Reds opt to roll with at the back end of the roster.