A Friday List!
Nick Martinez will wear a Cincinnati Reds uniform for at least a decent portion of the 2025 season. That’s now a fact, as he became the lone MLB player this winter who was given a Qualifying Offer from his 2024 club and chose to accept.
He’ll earn a hefty, yet deserved $21.05 million for the 2025 season. While that’s precisely the amount of cash it would have taken in 2025 for the Reds to try to land a pitcher of his caliber elsewhere in free agency, that’s already pushing their payroll for this year into the same ballpark where last year’s stood.
And the Reds roster still has voids. Many of them, especially on the position player front.
Short of the Reds finding suitors for both player and salary of their highest remaining earners…
Albert Cesare / The Enquirer via Imagn Content Services, LLC
…we’re likely to see the Reds address their needs by shopping slightly below the top shelf.
This is, after all, still a Reds roster with a ton of young, up-and-coming players put together by this front office to gel together, and many of them didn’t get that chance during the 2024 season due to injury and what have you. They seem very much committed to finding out what happens when the bulk of the current group healthily plays together, so I don’t foresee any additions that would shake that concept to its core.
That’s sometimes just fine! They landed a pretty solid, cheap year out of Ryan Ludwick this way over a decade ago, and we all remember how they stumbled into what Scooter Gennett gave them by bargain hunting. Is it fool-proof? No! Does it motivate the fans to buy tickets en masse! Hardly! But sometimes, these kinds of moves do manage to move the needle more than they appear to on the surface.
On Fridays around these parts, we list (when we can). The following is an incomplete list of players who, for reasons that are not totally finite, just seem like they’d be targets for Cincinnati’s search parameters this winter.
Mitch Garver – C/DH, Seattle Mariners
He’s a Mariner, which means the Reds are probably already looking at him. He also has a torrid pattern of being great one year and iffy the next, and last year falls into the iffy category with just an 85 OPS+ (after a brilliant 138 OPS+ in 2023).
He hit just .172/.286/.341 last year, but we know how much Seattle’s park mushes decent hitters when it can. He’s under contract for $12 million for 2025 before reaching free agency, but maybe the Reds could get some cash thrown their way and buy the dip to land him, giving them a potent bat (34 dingers over the last two years) who could spell Tyler Stephenson behind the plate and DH a bit.
Did I mention that among the 207 MLB players who logged at least 400 PA last year, Garver’s .216 BABIP was the lowest of all? He’s a career .282 BABIP guy, so there’s likely some regression there to whomever chooses to take that risk.
Cedric Mullins – CF, Baltimore Orioles
Cincinnati outfielders, on the whole, tallied just 1.4 fWAR during the 2024 season. That was better than only the Royals and the trio of perennial bottom-feeders that occupy the tail end of almost every leaderboard in every category (Rockies, Pirates, and White Sox).
The Reds need outfield help even if they do still plan to bank on a) TJ Friedl being healthy again, b) Jake Fraley being on the field more often after a brutal year of far more important family issues off the field, or c) Will Benson somehow being way better than he looked last year.
Enter Mullins, who just turned 30 and posted a rock solid 108 OPS+ for Baltimore over the course of his 7-year stint there. If the Orioles choose to try to keep Anthony Santander around, his presence paired with the emergence of former 1st round picks Colton Cowser and Heston Kjerstad means he may well be on the trade block as he enters his final arbitration year.
Mullins steals bags like a Red (332 last year, 30+ in three of the last four years), plays generally good defense in a primary defensive position, and has always mashed RHP. He’s a short-term rental who won’t clog the long-term plans, but may well provide some consistency in an area where the Reds have long needed it.
Randal Grichuk – OF, Free Agent
While adding Mullins would be effectively attempting to ‘replace’ a lot of the poor production the Reds got from their LH bats against RHP in 2024, adding Grichuk would be leaning hard into platooning those existing lefties with his right-handed bat. He mashed LHP to the tune of .319/.386/.528 in 163 PA last year for Arizona, and over a career that has seen him mash 203 career homers owns a .274/.324/.509 line against southpaws.
It’s worth noting that he’s no slouch against RHP, either, especially when compared to what the Reds rolled out against them last year. He popped 6 homers in just 95 PA against righties in 2024 as part of an overall .242/.274/.528 line against them, and he’s a career .733 OPS hitter against RHP.
He was limited just 279 PA last year after an early-season ankle injury and spent the previous two years mired in obscurity plying his trade for the Rockies and Angels, so maybe the rest of the baseball world will have forgotten he exists altogether and he’ll fall into the Reds lap for cheap.
Tyler O’Neill – OF, Free Agent
Last year the Reds splashed out $45 million to sign Jeimer Candelario, who checked in at #13 on MLB Trade Rumors list of the top free agents of the class (though they had him pegged for 4 years and $70 million). This year, O’Neill was listed as the #19 player on their annual list and estimated to land a $42 million over 3 years from some team, somewhere.
I list him here not necessarily because he falls firmly in the ‘bargain bin’ category, but because he feels like the fall-back option for folks trying to sign Juan Soto, then Teoscar Hernandez, or even Santander for a bopper in their outfield. And much like how the Reds made Candelario their go-to target last year despite there being a handful of higher-profile bats that could have fit their roster, I wonder if the Reds have making O’Neill their primary target might earn his good graces more than a club that actively sought out his peers first before calling him.
O’Neill, when healthy, is good. He’s also Canadian, so maybe they can have a certain #19 give him a call. Tyler bopped 31 homers en route to an .847 OPS with Boston last year, and back in 2021 you’ll recall he smashed 34 for St. Louis in a year in which he finished 8th in NL MVP voting.
(Elly De La Cruz, for reference, just finished 8th in this year’s NL MVP voting.)
He’s also only ever played more than 113 games once in his 7-year career, with knee and hamstring issues dogging him since he first cracked the big leagues back in 2018. So, there’s major risk there for any club, let alone a club like the Reds who’d be paying him enough to want to count on him more often than he’d ever been able to provide before.
If the Reds found a way to move Jonathan India’s $5 million and shake up the logjam in the infield, O’Neill would make a whole lot more sense financially and for the roster as a whole. Do the Reds have that kind of money laying around for 2025, though?