Trade grades for the Cincinnati Reds

There are a select few of you who have maintained interest in the workings of the Cincinnati Reds despite their poor performance on the field and stuck around all the way until 6:00 PM ET tonight to see what they did at the trade deadline.

You a freedivers, and for that I applaud you. You held your breath for a nearly record-breaking amount of time before Nick Krall and the rest of the front office managed to make a move of any kind, but despite the expected wave of moves not materializing there were a pair of moves that impacted both the present and future of the organization.

What stands out more than anything about this deadline, though, is that so many of the ‘obvious’ players the Reds probably should have traded did not get moved, and that calls into question the strategy as a whole.

Let’s dive in to how these moves look on the surface.
to the Cleveland Guardians for Alejandro Rivera

The Reds got Lowe on a minor league deal over the winter, held on to him long enough to promote him, and he ended up serving as a valuable left-handed bat in the strong side of a platoon at 1B/DH during his time with the Reds. He did all that on a salary of a bit less than $2 million, some of which Cleveland is now going to pick up over the rest of the season.

In landing Alejandro Rivera, the Reds get a really, really talented arm – albeit one who, at 19, has made one (1) career appearance in full-season minor league ball. He’s a lottery ticket that’s years away, but that’s precisely what you hope to get when your scratch-off Lowe ticket was purchased for a song months prior.

The only thing keeping this from being more of an A- is that the Reds chose to keep the rest of the rental gang together, and Lowe made the rental gang (and the Reds as a whole) better while being a part of it. If they’re really holding out for a miracle finish, well, subtracting Lowe dents those chances.
to the St. Louis Cardinals for $250K of international bonus pool cash

International bonus pool cash is awesome! It’s also capped based on an odd formula based on previous year spending and a litany of other things, and having more of it never hurts.

Caleb Ferguson had also been completely average in his role in the Cincinnati bullpen this year, and the remaining ~$1 million or so on his salary is now headed to St. Louis so the Reds can get that future spending cash. Add in that Ferguson was recently caught on camera hurling insults at an umpire, and I’m frankly impressed the Reds got anything for him at all right now.

The only thing keeping this from being an outright A is that the Reds surely hoped when they signed him that he’d be flippable as a bona fide All Star caliber reliever right now, and that simply never materialized. Getting something (and getting his salary off the books) is better than nothing, though.

You can very much make the case that Suarez had zero trade value given his prorated $15 million salary, and that’s some egg on the face of the front office (even though he had a serious oblique issue that cost him a month and clearly impacted his timing). Pierce Johnson had a forearm problem and has been mid, at best.

In Singer, Stephenson, and Burke, though, you’ve got three proven veterans playing some of their best ball of the year right this very month and none of them got moved. That’s perhaps $10 million in salary savings the Reds chose to eat, and keep that in mind the next time they cry poor in free agency.

Still, Singer will eat a lot of IP for the rest of the season that we can’t say Rhett Lowder, Chase Burns, or Nick Lodolo will be able to chew. That keeps IP off other, younger arms, and that’s got some value.

Stephenson knows the young staff and will help them continue to develop even though there was a larger market for catchers via trade this year than I can recall. Not cashing in on that sure seems like a misstep unless there’s something larger we don’t yet know.

All told, it’s an odd decision to stick with a huge cache of guys who don’t project to be around after the next 50+ games, and it makes you wonder if they simply think there’s a miracle in this group we’ve not yet uncovered. FanDuel seems to think that’s preposterous, though, as their +100000 odds to win the World Series in the wake of these moves (and non-moves) is tied for the lowest in all of Major League Baseball.