The World Series is over. The Los Angeles Dodgers completed a comeback on Wednesday night in game five, trailing 5-0 at one point, to defeat the New York Yankees and become World Series Champions for the second time in the last five seasons. With that, the offseason is ushered in.
Players who had their final year of their contract in 2024 are officially free agents as of Thursday morning. Sort of. Over the next five days those players are only allowed to negotiate with the team they played for last in 2024 – after which they can then shop their talents to any and all teams. Buck Farmer and Justin Wilson are both free agents.
Trades are back on the docket. Teams were prohibited from making trades until the World Series was over. But now that it is they can do as they please when it comes to swapping contracts of players.
When it comes to players who have options – and the Reds have several of them – everyone involved must make the decision on an option within five days of the World Series coming to an end. In this case, that will be Monday. Cincinnati has a club option on Luke Maile for $3,500,000 ($500,000 buyout) and Brent Suter for the same (with a $250,000 buyout). Nick Martinez ($12,000,000) and Emilio Pagan ($8,000,000) each have a player option. Jakob Junis ($8,000,000 with a $3,000,000 buyout) has a mutual option.
It seems unlikely that the Reds would make a qualifying offer to anyone with the exception of Nick Martinez. And even that could be up in the air. If Martinez opts out, which feels incredibly likely, the team has until 5pm ET on Monday to make him a qualifying offer ($21,500,000 for one year). Players have until November 19th to decide whether or not to take that deal.
The non-tender deadline is November 22nd. Players who are not under contract, but who are still under team control and have not yet reached free agency, must be tendered a contract for 2025 or be non-tendered by this date. Those tendered a contract will either head to arbitration in the spring or they will agree to a deal with their club ahead of that point in time. Those who are not tendered a contract will be left off of the 40-man roster and become free agents.
The Rule 5 draft will take place on December 11th. Teams have to make their decisions on who to add to the 40-man roster to protect from said Rule 5 draft ahead of that time. Finding the date for that hasn’t been as easy as one would think in the year 2024. There are conflicting reports for November 15th and November 19th.
The Winter Meetings begin on December 8th and run through the 11th. The MLB Draft lottery will be held here. A year ago the Reds beat the odds and then some, landing the 2nd pick in the 2024 draft. Maybe Cincinnati sends Devin Mesoraco back as their representative once again to see if he can be a lucky charm once more.
Those are the big dates for the rest of 2024. Once the calendar flips to 2025 you will be marking down January 10th as the date when arbitration eligible players and teams will exchange the figures they want for 2025.
The post What’s next for the Cincinnati Reds offseason? appeared first on Redleg Nation.