The Cincinnati Reds are once again asking for your patience

You’ve still got some left. Right?

I will apologize up front for the dive into jargon this piece will ultimately take.

Ceiling. Floor. Risk. Upside. Options. Pivot.

Cost.

The Cincinnati Reds recently went on – for them – a spending spree. They doled out $5 million to sign outfielder Austin Hays, fresh off his worst season as a professional, and followed it up with a day that included bringing in a pair of veteran lefties in Wade Miley (potentially for $4 million) and Taylor Rogers ($6 million after San Francisco kicked in some cash in the trade).

That’s a potential $15 million outlay spread out on a number of potential pieces, moves that come on top of the previous additions of pitcher Brady Singer, the versatile Gavin Lux, and the $21.05 million return of pitcher Nick Martinez.

The Reds offseason has not been quiet. It’s been pretty thorough in quantity, and they’ve routinely brought in players who have histories of production long enough to make the glaring holes that once existed on the roster at least feel somewhat paved over. Still, there’s an overriding feeling that the only way this team takes a legitimate step forward from where they’ve been is if the players who were already here – the group assembled during the most recent edition of The Rebuild ™ – simply find a way to produce star quality out of what we’ve already seen from them.

We got to witness that from Elly De La Cruz and Hunter Greene just last year. Two players who were long lauded as top prospects and potential stars who put a lot of things together at the same time, flashing one-of-a-kind skillsets and production to match. From almost every other member of the wave, however, we saw injury, underperformance, and a lot of question marks emerge, with the likes of Matt McLain, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, TJ Friedl, Will Benson, Noelvi Marte, Edwin Arroyo, and even Spencer Steer all producing significantly less than what was expected of them prior to Opening Day.

Is there really the kind of star power in that group that teams with postseason desires desperately need? McLain seemed to possess some in his 89 game run in 2023, though that a) is an incredibly small sample size, b) featured a .385 BABIP, and c) may well have been fueled by a swing change that ultimately began causing the oblique/shoulder injuries that wiped out his entire 2024 season. Friedl’s 2023 was equally as impressive and came over a full season of work, but it’s worth pointing out that TJ, who’ll turn 30 this year, isn’t exactly at the age where we can truly expect something of him beyond what we’ve already seen.

The roster, as it’s now constructed, features an abudance of players who, if things go as planned, will provide 1.5 WAR here, 1.9 WAR there. A corner OF platoon of Hays and Jake Fraley, providing middling defense and baserunning, might well hit its way to a combined 3 WAR season. If Steer gets the BABIP luck of ‘23 instead of that of ‘24, his bat might provide 3 oWAR before his subpar defense deflates that number back in the 2 WAR range. Lux, if he stays healthy and away from LHP, falls very much in that same boat.

That’s a pretty established floor. It’s there, you know it won’t go much lower than that. There’s enough of it around to consider it dependable, predictable. But, you also pretty much know what it is, and what it could produce in even the most positively freakish scenarios. Lux, for example, isn’t going to hit 35 homers in 2025 under any scenario.

To reach the lofty heights of a ~5 WAR season, however, you need four specific traits to realistically coalesce. You need the kind of speed to swipe bases. You need the kind of power to hit 30+ homers. You need the kind of defensive prowess to a) play a premium position and b) play it quite well. And, of course, you need to be on the field often enough to let that WAR compile over a lot of games played.

Batting average alone doesn’t get one to a ~5 WAR season, nor does speed alone, power alone, defensive ability alone, or longevity alone. With the limits of a 26-man active roster, you can only piecemeal those traits together through a number of different players in a very limited number of ways – a lefty masher, a righty masher, and a defensive specialist in the outfield could, in a perfect world, put up ~5 WAR combined over the course of a single year, but you’d need three full roster spots to make that happen, not one.

Having a player who, in the most positively freakish scenarios, could do all of those things provides ceiling for a roster. Whereas there aren’t enough games in a season for Lux to hit his way to 35 dingers, you can certainly see CES doing that, even though there aren’t enough games in a season for him to ever lumber his way to 25 steals or positive defensive value. Friedl could swipe 40 bags and be a Gold Glove worthy defender in the OF, if he stays healthy, but he’s not likely to flirt with those power numbers either.

It’s incredibly rare to find players who, all by themselves, provide that kind of ceiling with multiple tools.

Position players who, by themselves, are capable of ~5 WAR seasons at the big league level are few and far between. There were 17 of them in all of baseball during the 2023 season per FanGraphs fWAR, and 18 of them just last year. The only players who managed to top ~5 WAR in both of those seasons: Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor, Bobby Witt Jr., and William Contreras, evidence of both how rare it is to have that kind of upside talent and be able to produce it in back to back years.

FanGraphs lauded the work of White Sox CF Luis Robert Jr. as worth 4.9 fWAR in 2023, just narrowly missing the cut listed above. Baseball Reference valued his work that year as worth an even 5.0 bWAR, his 38 dingers, 20 steals, and 130 OPS+ indicative of the kind of high-ceiling work he’d shown in more limited time the previous three seasons. Robert has a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger in his trophy case already, and at just 27 years old it’s reasonable to expect we could still see that kind of peak production for at least a few more years…with maybe, just maybe, even more in the tank.

Photo by Aaron Doster/Getty Images

Those kinds of players just aren’t available very often. When they’re available in free agency, they land deals like those of Lindor, of Soto, of Bryce Harper. When they’re on competent teams, they usually get locked up to lucrative long-term deals that make trying to trade for them nearly impossible due to the years and massive dollar amounts tied to them (see: Witt Jr., Julio Rodriguez, Corbin Carroll).

Rarely, if ever, do you see a player who’s flashed the upside of Robert available via trade, let alone see him available on a contract that provides the kind of insane flexibility as his.

He might only be owed $17 million in total, should his 2026 option not be picked up. If a team acquired him hoping for a repeat of his 2023 and, instead, watched him suffer through injury after injury the way he did in 2024, 2022, and 2021, they could cut bait after just one somewhat expensive season (keep in mind that Jeimer Candelario will make $16 million in 2025). However, if Robert rekindles both the production and longevity he showed in 2023 (or even just the insanely good production in limited time he showed from 2020-2023), he’s got $20 million options for both the 2026 and 2027 seasons that look like absolute no-brainers for a guy capable of legitimate MVP-caliber production.

The only thing Robert, who has but that lone 5.0 bWAR season under his belt to date, has lacked throughout his career is good health. He’s battled hip, hamstring, and knee injuries so far, longevity being the only thing he doesn’t bring to the table. The power, the speed, the defense that scouts simply cannot find enough of around the world? Yeah, he’s got all of that, it’s just finding ways to stay on the field and in the lineup that’s the risk.

All of this I lay out due to the news we ran across this morning from The Athletic, news detailing how the Reds and White Sox had discussed a deal including Robert and, potentially, Reds prospect Edwin Arroyo, a deal that apparently fell apart due to the cost the with which the Reds could not reckon.

The report indicates that the Reds could not talk the White Sox into including enough cash to make the deal palatable for their meager budget. And, therefore, the Reds held on to their prospects and spent the budget that otherwise would’ve needed to be allocated to Robert on Hays, Wade Miley, and Rogers.

They pivoted to players who provide more floor, judging the risk it would have cost to acquire the ceiling of a player like Robert too substantial. Despite knowing what Robert was capable of doing when healthy, they’re instead going to again trust the offense to a cadre of players who either are known quantities who can’t begin to replicate Robert’s upside (Lux, Hays, Steer) or have been just as injured and haven’t ever shown that level of production at the big league level (CES, Marte, Benson, and even Arroyo).

It’s not even really a money thing. The Reds showed that by immediately spending what Robert would have earned elsewhere. It’s risk aversion, as they seemingly wanted to spread the risk of injury and underperformance around on the handful of upside-guys they already had rather than focus too much of it on one guy who, I’ll reiterate, has already shown how good he can be against big league pitching.

In other words, they’re once again asking us to wait, and see, and hope there’s someone already in-house who can turn out to be as good as Robert, when healthy, already is. Once again, the ownership and front office of this club is asking us all to play only the long game and forget, for another iteration, that the short game is even an option.