If the Cincinnati Reds didn’t lose the trade deadline this time around, they at least didn’t do much to make the team better toward the retooling that was supposed to be in play for another try at a playoff run next season.
With seven pending free agents on the roster, along with a few others who attracted serious interest from buyers in the weeks and days leading up to the Aug. 3 deadline, the Reds made exactly two nondescript trades that in a best-case scenario will pay off three or four years from now.
The return for those two players was indicative of the interest level – in most cases non-interest – the front office found in the players it was shopping, according to sources with rival teams on the buyer side of the market as well as within the organization:
- First baseman Nathaniel Lowe, a lefty-hitting platoon player who was signed to a one-year, $1.75 million deal the first week of spring training, was traded in the final minutes before the deadline to the Cleveland Guardians for 19-year-old pitcher Alejandro Rivera, a right-handed pitcher in low-A ball, and infielder Juan Brito, a former top-100 prospect who hit .176 in a 15-game MLB debut this season.
- Lefty reliever Caleb Ferguson, who signed a one-year $4.5 million deal over the winter, also was traded in the final minutes, to the division-rival St. Louis Cardinals for $250,000 of international bonus-cap space.
The return amounts to a lottery-ticket-level prospect and depth infielder, along with a bit of extra wiggle room to bid on 16-year-old international free agents and roughly $2 million in 2026 payroll savings.
Bottom line return for a Reds team stuck in last place in the division and behind six teams for the NL’s final wild-card berth: meh.
“We had a lot of conversations about a lot of guys,” said team president Nick Krall, who signaled in recent weeks a desire to do much more, in particular to augment next year’s effort to compete again for a playoff berth.
“At the end of the day the deals just weren’t there for us,” he said. “That’s why we moved the guys we did.”
Both Lowe and Ferguson are pending free agents.
Among the five others the Reds shopped, only one is a candidate for a $23 million qualifying offer that would assure at least draft-pick compensation for his loss to free agency: starting pitcher Brady Singer – who has been the rotation’s workhorse during his two seasons with the club, including pitching through a pair of injuries (blister, bruised foot) that might have cost others IL time.
“We’re going to play the rest of the season out and see what happens. We’ll discuss that when we get to November,” Krall said.
Meanwhile, the four other free agents the Reds were unable to move are all but certain to be lost to free agency without the club getting anything for them.
“We weighed that going into the deadline, but at the end of the day what we were getting back from teams we talked to at the deadline didn’t offset (the value of those players) for the last two months of the season,” said Krall, who mentioned the value, on the other hand, of keeping some veteran presence around important young core players ahead of next year’s push.
If the deadline results were disappointing to fans who might have expected more bang for the organization, Krall stopped short of that characterization.
“You would hope that more things would have happened,” he said. “But at this point they just didn’t.”
If the Reds plan to win next year, it might not be the worst thing to have Singer back on an overpriced one-year contract considering he’s the only Reds starter who hasn’t spent a day on the IL the past two seasons.
Meanwhile, the club is banking on his influence the rest of this year on young pitchers on the staff, as well as well the influence respected veteran catcher Tyler Stephenson, who didn’t draw high interest from catcher-needy teams such as the White Sox (Joey Bart), Red Sox (Adley Rutschman) and Rays (Liam Hicks), who turned to other players.
“Brady Singer is one of our better leaders in our starting pitching staff, and Tyler’s the same way,” Krall said. “I think it’s really important to have those guys around this club (rather) than just saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to move guys off.”
Krall said other teams “reached out on probably 20-ish guys on our roster.” That included Hunter Greene and JJ Bleday, both of whom are under control for at least two more seasons.
Bleday, one of the success stories of the season for the Reds, who signed him to a $1.4 million deal in December, was “a very popular ask on the trade market,” Krall said.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Why Cincinnati Reds failed to move more players at MLB trade deadline
