When the Cincinnati Reds made a qualifying offer to Nick Martinez this past week it seemed that the consensus was that he was likely to decline it as he would get more money overall by signing a free agent deal, even if it wasn’t going to be for as much money per season as the qualifying offer would give him. Jon Heyman of the New York Post, though, is reporting this morning that Martinez is expected to accept the Reds offer that would pay him $21,050,000 for the 2025 season.
Now, “expected to” doesn’t always mean that it happens. But let’s assume that it does happen for a second. What that does is give Cincinnati a quality starting pitcher to add (back) to their rotation. Martinez had the best season of his career in 2024, posting an ERA of 3.10 and throwing 142.1 innings. Those were both career bests. So was his strikeout-to-walk ratio, which was the best ever in a season by a Reds pitcher with at least 130.0 innings pitched.
What it also does is add to the payroll. While $21,050,000 is not at all a big contract in today’s game – that’s the AVERAGE pay for a single season of the top 125 paid players in the game – it’s not a small amount of salary, either. The Reds payroll for 2025 is unknown. And it isn’t just unknown to you and I, but to the club itself. It seems that they just don’t know what they want/are able to spend based on how they run things. That’s tied up in the fact that they don’t know what’s going to happen with their television contract because of the ongoing issues with Diamond Sports Group – the parent company of what was Bally Sports and now FanDuel Sports Network.
Without any other moves being made and Martinez accepting the qualifying offer and adding $21,050,000 to the current expected payroll of the current players puts the team at roughly $92,000,000 for 2025. That does not include any of the buyouts that they had to pay to players who had options at the end of 2024 that were paid as they became free agents.
How much money that leaves the front office to use to go out and try to acquire players in free agency is up in the air. For everyone. At least for now, as the team doesn’t know how much they can/will spend. Trades are always another possible way to add to the team (or subtract from it if the trade goes poorly in the end), but who the team could acquire may still come down to how much money that player is owed.
It seemed that the Reds were comfortable enough with the idea of Nick Martinez accepting the qualifying offer or they wouldn’t have made it. Even if they expected he might not take it, they knew the possibility was there that he could and wouldn’t have put it out there if they knew they couldn’t cover it. But how much more comfortable they will be in adding salary beyond there, especially when there’s a big unknown that could be worth tens of millions of dollars, is perhaps the offseason’s biggest question mark for the club at this point.
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