When Can Cincinnati Paint the NL Central Red?
To put it charitably, it’s been a rough 18 months for fans of the Reds. Finding themselves surprisingly in the wild card race in July 2021, the team’s front office bravely ran away at the trade deadline, choosing only to improve the bullpen depth slightly. The downhill slope has only grown steeper since then, as the organization chose to go into full fire sale mode, trading practically every player with a significant contract who drew interest from another team. The exodus of talent had immediate results in Cincy: the team lost 100 games for the first time since 1982, when Reds GM Dick Wagner conducted his own fire sale on the dried-up husk of the Big Red Machine.
For anyone who may have thought that Cincinnati’s suddenly hard-line approach to spending was a temporary rebuilding strategy, ownership has done its best to disabuse fans off the notion. Bob Castellini was reportedly one of the owners who didn’t want to raise the luxury tax threshold at all, and he’s spoken repeatedly about the team’s finances. Club president Phil Castellini, during a lunch with a Reds booster group, gave a confusing presentation about how awful it was to own a baseball team, complete with a bizarre presentation that either made myriad mistakes or simply made up playoff projections from this very site. Most prognostications have the Reds challenging the Pirates for fourth place in the NL Central in 2023.
Against this backdrop, not all is doom and gloom. Despite the disappearance of talent at the major league level, there are a lot of interesting players in the minors. The farm system improved to eighth in the league in our late 2022 rankings, and five prospects made our recently released Top 100 Prospects list. The 2023 ZiPS projections for the Reds are bleak, but it’s more optimistic about the state of the farm system, ranking seven Cincinnati prospects in its Top 100. Overall, 11 players made the Top 200 in the ZiPS prospect list, including a ludicrous numbers of shortstops (five).
| Player | Position | ZiPS Rank | FanGraphs Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elly De La Cruz | SS | 14 | 6 |
| Noelvi Marte | SS | 15 | 94 |
| Matt McLain | SS | 30 | Unranked |
| Spencer Steer | 3B | 51 | 47 |
| Edwin Arroyo | SS | 58 | 52 |
| Allan Cerda | CF | 73 | Unranked |
| Christian Encarnacion-Strand | 3B | 96 | Unranked |
| Connor Phillips | P | 160 | Unranked |
| Andrew Abbott | P | 170 | Unranked |
| Jose Torres | SS | 190 | Unranked |
| Chase Petty | P | 196 | Unranked |
| Alejo Lopez | 2B | 211 | Unranked |
| Michael Siani | CF | 223 | Unranked |
| Rece Hinds | RF | 254 | Unranked |
| Tyler Callihan | 2B | 308 | Unranked |
| Ivan Johnson | 2B | 322 | Unranked |
| Jay Allen II | CF | 335 | Unranked |
| Matheu Nelson | C | 362 | Unranked |
There’s not a whole lot of pitching on this list, but the good news is that the Reds already have some promising arms on their roster. ZiPS thinks that the three front-end starters — Hunter Greene, Graham Ashcraft, and Nick Lodolo — will all make positive contributions in 2023, and odds are they’ll be even better come ’25 or ’26. Before and after a shoulder strain that cost most of his August, Greene was dominant in his 35 1/3 second-half innings, with a 1.02 ERA, 1.70 FIP, 13 strikeouts per game, and a walk rate cut in half from before the All-Star break. The last may be the most important; it doesn’t take a whole lot of innings to establish an improved (or worsened) walk rate. Lodolo, meanwhile, barely needed a half-season to put up 2 WAR, and Ashcraft and his high-90s fastball ought to have some strikeout upside.
If we construct a roster based on who is under contract or team control, you can cobble together most of a pretty interesting 2025 roster. Now, not all of these players will actually be on the roster in two years; the idea is to get the baseline for a team with the players the Reds currently have.
C Tyler Stephenson
1B Christian Encarnacion-Strand
2B Jonathan India
3B Noelvi Marte
SS Elly de la Cruz
LF Spencer Steer
CF Matt McLain
RF Allan Cerda
DH Jake Fraley
C Mat Nelson
IF Edwin Arroyo
OF Michael Siani
OF Stuart Fairchild
SP Hunter Greene
SP Nick Lodolo
SP Graham Ashcraft
SP Andrew Abbott
SP Connor Phillips
RP Alexis Díaz
RP Tejay Antone
RP Justin Dunn
RP Reiver Sanmartin
RP Ian Gibaut
RP Connor Overton
RP Joel Kuhnel
RP Ricky Karcher
You can no doubt quibble with any of these choices, because this is highly speculative. Maybe the shortstops sort themselves out in a different way, assuming that some aren’t directly traded for outfield help. Perhaps the Reds stick with Nick Senzel through his free-agent season, but I personally feel that he’s a prime suspect to be non-tendered after 2023. There are myriad choices that can be made differently, but generally speaking, if you can only make the 2025 Reds using in-organization players, the basic framework is likely to be something in this ballpark.
I did this with the Pirates last week (and the rest of the league), and I only got the Bucs to 76 wins in 2025. But the Reds have a sunnier baseline; with all teams under the same constraints, they “start” 2025 with a baseline projection of 85 wins. That’s not to say that will be the projection, only where the team stands in talent in 2025 compared to the rest of the league. And an 84-win team in the NL Central is a contender, unless someone decides to go all-in, Padres-style, in the next couple years.
This is where Cincinnati hits an important decision point. If a team like this looks to be a contender in 2025, would there actually be investment in the roster in free agency to get it over the top? The lack of this was the crucial element that doomed the good 2010s Pirates teams. Will the Castellinis, if they’re still the owners, stick to their financial guns when there’s a real chance at playoff contention? It doesn’t really make sense to spend a lot on the Reds as they’re currently constructed, but what happens when there’s a compelling reason to? I don’t know the answer to that question, though I’m cautiously pessimistic.
There’s a lot to not like about the Reds right now. But there’s a lot to like about their future, if ownership is willing to allow that future to fully bear fruit.
Dan Szymborski is a senior writer for FanGraphs and the developer of the ZiPS projection system. He was a writer for ESPN.com from 2010-2018, a regular guest on a number of radio shows and podcasts, and a voting BBWAA member. He also maintains a terrible Twitter account at @DSzymborski.
Dan,
In your opinion, does the team ownership need to spend more money on the team, or less?
Read the article. That’s what the entire thing is about.
When people talk about bad owners in other sports, it’s almost always because they’re clueless, too hands on, too attached to players, etc. Sure, there are a few outliers, like Dan Snyder, but overall everyone spend money. Hell James Dolan the laughingstock of the NBA pays his players handsomely and never cared to penny-pinch. Or just look at the other Cincinnati team that’s also considered inept by its fanbase over the years, and it’s still so much better than the Reds even pre-Burrow. It’s only baseball where inept = cheap.
So essentially my point is, when will people start clamoring for a specific player/owner split of the Baseball-Related-Income that the other major sports have? Instead of keeping on prodding big teams like the Red Sox and the Yankees to spend obscene amount of money and small teams to spend modicum amount of money, wouldn’t it be better to just FORCE every team to spend a good amount of money? And we can judge owners by their actual ineptness instead of just by how cheap they are?
Dan brings up a real-world example of a recent small market owner not investing enough when his team was good: Bob Nutting of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Because neither the owners nor the players will agree to it? Too many owners would lose out under that system because it would include collective revenue sharing. And from the players’ perspective they don’t trust the owners to report revenues properly. These proposals also always come with a cap anyway, which the players view as a non-starter. The players for a while actually had a goal of rolling back revenue sharing, which I think is a terrible move for them and for the game but it tells you where they are.
Eh, I’m pretty sure owners once proposed the idea of salary cap which essentially means revenue sharing and salary floor due to how the system has to work.
Players obviously don’t agree to it… but that’s the thing, right? Why are players complaining about a free market system they themselves advocated, when free market means owners can choose to not pay for player services? Its clear from other major sports that owners all show they’re all clearly rich billionaires when they’re forced to spend money. It’s only when they don’t need to spend, that they choose not to spend.
The issue is that the market is not entirely free. The only reason the Reds, Pirates, A’s etc. are able to operate without spending significant money is because of the remnants of the reserve system that set a low cost for 0-3 year players (and still limits the cost of 4-6 year players). Without that, the stingier owners wouldn’t really have a choice not to spend something more than what they do. That said, I’m not totally sure it would be preferable for the league or the players for there not to be some limits on wages for incoming players. It would potentially compress salaries for the top level players in FA, and it might cause some real challenges for smaller market teams without more significant revenue sharing. The ultimate results for player salaries may be sort of similar to a cap and floor system.
This is why I’m in favor of going to arbitration after two years of service time and/or raising the minimum salary. If you want teams to spend more, that is the way to do it.
But then they’d just cut back even more on free agent spending to make up for those losses.
Some would, like the Rays, but I actually think most of them would not. Most of these teams are not quite as rational as we make them out to be.
No, most teams are quite rational when it comes to managing their revenues versus expenses. Given holding reveune, a significant incease in expenses in one area usually means a necessary decrease of cutting expenses in other areas in order for the bottom line to remain intact.
It’s similar to how when the pandemic dropped revenues and the Player’s Union foolishly threw the upcoming free agency class under the bus by refusing to accept further 2020 salary pay cuts, most teams naturally dropped payroll significantly over the 2020-21 (and even 2021-22 to a degree) offseason in response.
The only way to force the small market teams to spend more on the Major League payroll is to have an explicit salary floor, and even then they’ll probably cut expenses in other areas like analytics, scouting, development, international signings, etc., although that would still likely be an overall improvement to MLB’s economics and competitive balance.
No. Other sports have rookie contracts which are much cheaper than veteran contracts. The problem is you can’t have an all rookie NFL roster because there is a salary floor. It’s only MLB where some teams spend 10 times as much as other teams, and it ain’t because 60 years ago there was a reserve system.
They might spend a little more, but without that seniority salary system they would *never* be able to put together a competitive team! It’s a necessary evil to allow the small markets one good way to occasionally put together a window of contention via cheap, young stars that they draft and develop.
I’m basically agnostic on this idea since it depends so much on the details (what split, exactly?) but it’s probably worth noting that baseball has, by most accounts, the strongest union and the most player-friendly revenue split of the major sports right now, under the current arrangement. (Probably by a lot.) Seems unlikely as a matter of labor relations that you could get the owners to agree to the fixed-split, fixed-spending deal and essentially lock in the players’ gains up till now — but also, if the players have been (in aggregate) better off than other athletes under the current non-fixed spending regime, why would they want to change it?
Splits are negotiated in the CBA. I think it’s 50/50 in NBA and like 52/48 in the NFL. So there’s no set amount it’s just whatever you can negotiate for.
And you’re right that supposedly baseball union is the strongest. But what has it done for its players? In terms of overall player salaries it’s still roughly 50/50 split with the owners. But baseball has by far the most difficult path to earnings of all major sports, up to unlimited years in the minors and 3+ pre-arb years in the majors before salary reaches over a million. I don’t think people have done studies but I’d bet MLB has easily the biggest players salary disparity in all of major sports.
So really from a player’s perspective it’s the haves and have nots. If you can be Gerrit Cole you’re golden. If you’re Gavin Lux though and have season-ending injury one year before your arbitration… your future earnings can get screwed dramatically.
Totally agree that improving non-stars’ situation ought to be the front-burner problem for the MLBPA (though I think they’ve gotten better on it in the past 5 or so years already — negotiating fairly big increases in the minimum salary, etc). But I’m not clear why we should think that the negotiated-revenue-split thing would affect it one way or the other.
i think mclain is gonna stick at SS, reminds me a lot of dansby
It’s not so much I don’t think he can’t stick at SS but simply because if I have de la Cruz at short, there just wasn’t a logical infield spot for him. Since McLain does have some speed and he played a bunch of center at UCLA early on, that it’s not a crazy theoretical move if they don’t just trade him for an OF (which was beyond the scope of this exercise).
This assumes that De La Cruz sticks at short. The most likely scenario seems like a Fernando Tatis-like outcome, with lots of range and lots of errors.
There are better and worse outcomes related to him bulking up and slowing down on the one hand, or fixing the errors on the other. I know, I know, you always give the guy with the biggest bat the chance to stick at shortstop but I’m pretty convinced that McLain and Arroyo are more likely long-term shortstops than him.
Which owner is worse for fans of their team? Dick Monfort, who is just… lost? Let’s go with lost. Doesn’t know what he’s doing. Or Castellini, who obviously gives zero craps about the city, team, players, and fans?
I loathe the Castellinis, but Dick Monfort is completely detached from reality.
Castellini is the worst because of his utter contempt for the fans, but I’d still rather be a Reds fan. He sounds miserable, so he might sell. And they have enough talent coming that there is something to look forward to.
It’s easily Castellini. Dick Monfort does not know what he’s doing, but he has been successful at least at making seeing a Rockies game an appealing thing to do in Denver despite how bad the team is. An incompetent owner who cares makes for at least a somewhat less despondent fan culture, even if the team itself isn’t much better
A backdrop of big pointy mountains and plentiful weed also make games an appealing thing to do in Denver even when bad contracts are being handed out to Ian Desmond and the like
Sorry Reds fans your ownership is terrible. I keep going to Atlanta’s financial reports anytime a team cries poverty. That said the Jessie Winkler Trade was fortunate and you’ve lucked into a decent player. Even though the headliner of that trade is regressing.
i mean they do have the owner with the lowest net worth. cohen is spending more on the mets this season than castelinni’s net worth
That doesn’t really matter, as sports franchise owners who spend out of their own pockets like Cohen are very rare.
Never trust an owner who starts unexpectedly spending large amounts of money in free agency. Kendrick, Reinsdorf, Castellini, and Moreno are the classic examples of this. They ping pong between spending huge amounts of money and crying poor, both to the media and when a CBA negotiation comes up. When it’s time to actually put a team over the top, they will decide they have spent enough and get cheap.
The head scratching part for all of those owners is they almost always spend it unwisely. They spend on older FAs or corner OF/IF who have flashing warning signs.
If you’re an owner in any one of those markets, when you spend big, it should be on a Correa. Or big on a short-term, big dollar guy like Scherzer/Verlander. They always seem to spend it on the wrong guy and then act surprised and complain when it goes poorly.
The “Benintendi-Moustakas rule”? I would also say Castellanos too, but that one actually turned out okay because he opted out after his career year and the Reds wisely decided not to retain him.
My understanding is that this happens because warning-signs players typically have fewer options than the elite ones. That means they’re cheaper, which matters since very few players are going to choose to go to a bad team for equal money when a good team offers the same. So they have to offer more for the same players. (And because these owners are cheap.)
A trait that successful small market clubs have is that they extend their best players early and that extends their competitive window. The Reds by in large don’t. Look at Seattle they locked up Julio Rodriguez after 1 season. I mean even the Rays are locking up their best players early. Why haven’t the Reds started doing the same?
I wouldn’t call the Mariners “small market” but I would agree that’s something that most successful teams do, regardless of market size.
Market size in general is a joke. It’s 2023 and MLB is a live sport…They’re all big market
If an owner has deep pockets they are able to smooth over cashflow issues that may arise from signing players to large long-term deals(signing bonuses, or front-loaded salaries). If a guy like Castellini is really only worth $300 million, then he can’t just write a $50 million check to cover the cashflow issues raised by a new long-term deal for Hunter Greene.
Most owners don’t do that and insist on making a profit, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Cohen is the exception.
It was forever ago, but they extended Votto. And honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better long-term contract. The 2 of the last 3 years have been tough, but for overall value that contract is pretty solid.
Beyond that, show a former Reds farmhand that they should regret not having locked up? They DID lock up Suarez and arguably won both sides of his trades (him coming to Cincinnati and shipping him out). Cueto was great until they traded him at the deadline and then, poof. Cozart was a Top 5 SS in his FA year, they let him walk, and he was out of the league 2 years later. Same goes for Latos, Winker, Bruce, & Lorenzen.
You could make the argument for DeSclafani (for 1 season), Frazier for a couple seasons, Gray, and Iglesias. I think it’s still too fresh to say how Castillo winds up, but none of these guys were what they were missing from a competitive window.
Despite having a down year last year, Winker has had a good career even since leaving the Reds. That’s one they could’ve signed to an extension and not regretted it.
That’s true about the warning sign players, they don’t have as many options. Even so it just felt like the timing was a little off for Cincy to hand out both of those contracts to those players coming off a 75 win season. If they wanted to throw 20 mil a season at a player, I’d want to at least be a bit higher in wins and have a better balanced team to go for it (only one of the players who put up more than two wins was under 27, Castillo).
As a Bucs fan, I can applaud that Cincinnati spent money while also questioning the manner in which they spent it.
Wasn’t the bigger issue for those Pirates teams just bad luck at the state of the Central in their best years? They were second in baseball in wins from 2013-2015- behind the Cardinals. The spending could have extended their window and gotten more out of the 2016 and onward teams, and spending could have absolutely made them better, but I think they had the misfortune of bad timing.
I mean, I feel like bad luck can only explain so much of the utter tailspin that was 2017-present.
It was bad timing, but they didn’t do much to help themselves either. In all three seasons from 2013-2015, Pgh was 3.5 games or less back of the first place team in the central. And they never really made any sort of acquisition that could have made a major difference down the stretch or into the next season (like trading for Price in 2014 to have him for 1.5 years).
The lack of doing anything in 2014 hurt the most. Pgh was 3.5 back and in fourth place at the break in a really soft division. And didn’t do much of anything.
Huntington explained his thinking in that time period, too. Fans called it the “Drive for 85”. NH, basically: “If you win 85 games per season over a period of years year in and year out, you’ll make it to the NLCS eventually and might get a WS appearance.”
Yep, and it really didn’t work either. It’s an incredibly passive and hopeful stance for a GM to take. That FO bought into their belief that they’d have this long window of contention. Didn’t quite work out that way.
Not really. The theory itself isn’t bad, as it’s basically the Cardinals’ M.O., but you had to shoot for an average of about 90 wins per year rather than 85 to get in the playoffs consistently before last year’s playoff expansion.
Besides, he couldn’t get to 85 for longer than a 3 year period.
I think you still have to shoot for 90ish wins to make the playoffs with some consistency.
See, for example, last years’ Brewers who finished July on a 90-win pace and figured, “hey, we don’t need our closer, really,” dropped to 86 wins and were left out of the postseason.
Perhaps, but Hader sported a 7.31 ERA for the Padres after the trade, I’m not sure that would help bridge the gap between “playoff team” and “not”.
(I think your overall point is correct, but that specific example just worked out terribly for the acquiring team)
The specifics of that trade are tricky to parse:
Outside of one appearance against KC (6ER, but only -0.026 WPA as they were already down 3 in the b8th), Hader had an ERA of 4.5.
From that game to the end of the season he had an ERA of 0.79, FIP 1.44.
Meanwhile Rogers had a ERA for the Brewers of 5.48, FIP of 5.07, and accumulated -1.04 WPA (.082 worse than Hader, post-trade).
At the end of the day, it didn’t work out too terribly for the Padres. They made the playoffs and Hader threw 5.1 innings with no runs allowed.
If they had spent some more in those years, they might have won a division title or two and gotten to skip past the Wild Card Game.
If the Reds are smart, they’re going to sign Lodolo and Greene to long-term contracts after next season. Lock in those guys pre-arb so that when whatever set of De La Cruz, Collier, McLain, Arroyo, Marte, Steer, Abbott, Petty, etc. They currently have zero guaranteed contracts for 2024 and they’re probably not missing Votto or Myers next year, especially since India or Encarnacion-Strand or Steer might need to move to first base. In 2024, they will probably only need to sign a backup catcher. Many of their arb guys are could very well get non-tendered too (Newman, Senzel, Dunn) since the Reds will have more than enough replacement-level guys in the to backup their actual major leaguers.
It would absolutely be worth it for them to pay their top two pitchers now to keep them around for all of the current prospects’ control years. Will the Reds do that? Probably not. Castellini has been weird for a while now, going all in on Mike Moustakas and Castellanos and then immediately crying poor after 2020.
Yep. Extend, extend, extend. This is the team that should be trying to emulate the Braves model. But are they smart enough to know that?
you think India needs to move to 1b?
If so, they need to flip him asap.
You know, I didn’t think that until I looked at his OAA numbers and I don’t know where he moves, but the metrics do not see him as the future at 2B. But he also got on base at a pretty good clip his rookie year so there’s a chance he could make it as a hit over power type in a corner (not sure which one).
It’s a precipitous fall from the team whose fans stuffed the all-star ballot in 1957 or dominated baseball in the 1970s with an all-time great team. There’s no reason why they can’t do as well as the Cardinals
The Cardinals do have the advantage, as they can at least spend a lot more than the Reds do thanks to their consistently excellent attendance.
The Reds had that also in the past. They squandered that goodwill
As a Cincinnati sports fan, my all-time sports “what if?” is what if the DeWitts still owned the Reds? Bill Sr. was the owner/GM in the 60s and Jr. was a part owner before he bought the Cardinals and still lives in Cincinnati. Similar sized metro areas, not hard to see an alternate reality where the current states of the Reds and Cardinals are reversed.
Close second is if the Bengals had kept Bill Walsh and made him the head coach.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the Cardinals would’ve wound up with a bad owner in exchange, though.
Yes & similar to the Cardinals, they, wth success, could also have a regional following that juices a smallish metro area.
Dayton (metro population of 800K) is about 1 hour away. Lexington (Metro population of 550K) is about 90 minutes. Louisville (1.4M) is about 90 minutes.
Indianapolis & Columbus are about 2 hours & over 2M in population each. Indy/C’bus have other competition in Cleveland & Chicago teams, but, there’s no reason a successfully run team wouldn’t have significant penetration in those 2 markets, too.
Interesting analysis. You mentioned you did a similar analysis for the rest of the league but I believe the linked article only mentions the Pirates.
As a Nats fan getting through spring training via extra doses of delusion, I wonder how the lowly Nationals are looking in 2025? I wonder if ZiPS views the Nats as being in similar, better, or worse position as the Reds
The backdrop to all this no one outside of the immediate fanbase talks about: the Castellinis view their ownership as a public service, both to the city (to ensure the team doesn’t move), and to the rest of the ownership group (who Bob infamously promised never to ask more money from after the initial sale). Castellini believes himself on a noble crusade, and his primary loyalty is to the 19 or so rich friends who he believes to be on the crusade with him.
Cincinnati is fundamentally different than the other small market teams, in that its owner has been up front that attempting to win isn’t even secondary – if it’s on the list of priorities at all, it’s very low. There’s no pretending what’s happening here. There’s no illusion of a plan, beyond cutting costs at every corner. And that’s the indefinite future, because the Castellinis genuinely believe they’re doing a good thing.
Thank you for this pipedream of hope, Dan. As a Reds fan this might be the most positive things I have read in, I forget, but a while.
Kinda hard to imagine that Will Benson will not be one of the Reds’ top 6 OF by 2025, or that Brandon Williamson will be missing from the top 13 pitchers. Both may well have starting jobs by the end of this season, if not sooner.
The NL Central is already painted red, Cardinal red. No new paint job is needed.
At least the Reds will have $18M available next offseason after buying out Votto’s option if nothing else.
Not sure what anyone expects them to do.
The big free agents are taking home enormous paydays. If they make a mistake, ala Jason Heyward, it would be absolutely crippling to a small franchise like the Reds.
Guys they can afford probably do not want to play there because of the contention window.
I would think they could court hitters with that great ballpark for hitting, but maybe they have financial constraints they don’t talk openly about?
Or, sure, maybe they are just tanking to make money.
Found Castellini’s burner account!
You can give me a lineup and pitching staff of:
SS-OneilCruz
C-EndyRodriguez
LF-BryanReynolds
CF-DylanCrews
DH-HenryDavis
RF-JackSuwinski
3B-KeHayes
2BJ.Bae
1B-JaredTriolo/MattGorski/JacobGonzalez
MasonMartin/JosiahSightler etc.
SP-RoansyContreras, QuinnPriester, MikeBurrows, LuisOrtiz, MitchKeller
RP-D.Bednar
RP-ColinSelby
RP-ColinHolderman
RP-TahnajThomas
RP-JcFlowers
RP-BlakeCederlind
RP-TylerSamaniego(LH)
RP-JoseHernandez(LH)
I see why you’re not called Tusconbob or Fargobob
Complaining about ownership groups is so tired. There’s always going to be inequality in baseball. Yes, all the owners are rich, but they’re not all equally rich. If they all started spending like Cohen does today, Cohen would start spending more.
Sports are zero-sum. There’s no world where every owner starts spending hundreds of millions and suddenly every team is winning 90 games.
Now, I think it’s fair to complain that some owners don’t spend enough when their teams are close to contention, but I don’t think the Reds are in that situation.