The Cincinnati Reds started the offseason with a bang as they traded Jonathan India and minor leaguer Joey Wiemer for right-handed pitcher Brady Singer in a deal with the Kansas City Royals. But then for the next two months there was a whole lot of nothing going on aside from being vaguely mentioned in a few rumors. Weeks after the winter meetings came to an end, the Reds front office seems to have gotten things going again. After some minor league signings, the team announced late on Friday night that they had acquired catcher Jose Trevino from the New York Yankees in exchange for right-handed reliever Fernando Cruz and minor league catcher Alex Jackson.
Cincinnati had lost basically their entire catching crew from Double-A, Triple-A, and the big leagues outside of Tyler Stephenson following the 2024 season due to free agency. They had signed Alex Jackson to a minor league deal early in the offseason to give them some depth in case of injury, but he wasn’t likely seen as Stephenson’s backup. The team was still searching for whoever that would be.
It would appear that Jose Trevino is going to be that guy. He has been in the big leagues in each of the last seven years – debuting with the Texas Rangers back in 2018 with a handful of games. He joined the New York Yankees in 2022 and made the All-Star team that season – the only year in which he played in more than 90 games in his career.
Redleg Nation’s Jason Linden has talked repeatedly about the state of backup catchers in today’s game and that good ones don’t really exist (Jason, sorry if this is poor paraphrasing!). But his essential point is that if a guy could actually hit and be a catcher, they wouldn’t be a backup in the current era. That describes Jose Trevino quite well.
The 32-year-old has a career .236/.275/.362 line. He’s hit 32 home runs in 399 games in the big leagues. In none of his parts of seven seasons has he had an on-base percentage better than last year’s .288 mark. You can see his career stats here.
Behind the plate he’s known to be a quality defender. Despite playing in just 74 games, Fangraphs had his defensive value as 9th best among catchers in baseball. Every player who was in the Top 16 played in more games than he did. His caught stealing rate has been all over the place throughout his career. Of course we understand better now than ever before that most bases are stolen on the pitcher and not the catcher. In 2022 he led the league with a 33.3% caught stealing rate. For his career his rate is 23.2%.
While Trevino is joining the Reds, Cincinnati is sending out Fernando Cruz and Alex Jackson. The latter never put on a Reds jersey and was likely headed for Triple-A. But Cruz has been a part of the big league bullpen over the last three seasons.
After a strong debut in limited action in 2022 where he posted a 1.23 ERA in 14.2 innings, the last two seasons have been inconsistent. When he’s on, he’s dominant. But too often he’s not on and you can see that by the fact that his ERA was 4.91 and 4.86 in the previous two seasons. He can rack up strikeouts with the best of them. His control can be spotty, though.
Cincinnati will need to replace him in the bullpen, but they could potentially do that internally. Right now everyone is healthy, and that could change, but there are more starting pitchers than there are spots in the rotation. If that remains the same heading into the 2025 season the Reds could move one (or more) of the guys who don’t win a spot in the rotation over to the bullpen to help out there.
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