The deal brings back depth, of course, but costs the Reds their Opening Day starter.
The dream when the Cincinnati Reds signed Frankie Montas late in the offseason was obvious: that he’d morph right back into a frontline starter and lead the club to postseason glory.
The realistic, optimistic hope was slightly less obvious: that he’d show up healthier than he had been before, pitch pretty well, and be a guy who ended up worth more than the $16 million guaranteed the Reds gave him on his pillow contract.
There was always the chance the Reds could thread the needle and be both a) good enough to pursue postseason glory and b) have Montas be a major part of that. So far in 2024, though, it looks like neither of those things are going to pan out. With Tuesday’s trade deadline looming, the Cincinnati Reds chose to cash-in on that latter realistic, optimistic hope and deal Montas to a team starving for starting pitching and land a return that makes their financial outlay feel unwasted.
Veteran RHP Jakob Junis and former Top 100 overall OF prospect Joey Wiemer will join the Reds organization from Milwaukee, who shelled out for Montas after already using an absurd 16 other starting pitchers so far in 2024. Junis, who like Montas will be a free agent at season’s end, comes with a wealth of experience both starting and relieving, and will likely help backfill some of the gap left by Montas immediately as the Reds tweak their overall staff. Wiemer, meanwhile, has struggled to just a 69 OPS+ in 437 PA at the big league level across the last two seasons, but brings elite OF defense and an .843 OPS in over 1200 minor league PA to the table at still just 25 years of age.
Per MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy, the Reds are also getting $1 million in the deal, as the option buyouts for Montas ($2 million) and Junis ($3 million) at season’s end were precisely that far apart.
In all, it’s a pretty fair return for a Reds club that is clearly selling fringe players while trying like hell to remain somewhere in the 2024 race. In reality, outside of the absolute ‘dream’ scenario with Montas, that’s kind of what the true hope with him should have always been.
He missed almost the entire 2023 season with shoulder issues, and the Reds landed him for as cheap as they did because of said injuries and the lack of any IP on his arm during that season. And while the results obviously weren’t tremendous for him in 2024, they were good enough to show he was healthy again - though after making the jump to 93.1 IP already this year from 1.1 in all of 2023, the Reds likely were willing to deal him while he was still healthy and not fatigued.
In all honesty, that kind of had to always be their thinking. With the likes of Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, Nick Martinez, Graham Ashcraft, Carson Spiers, Brandon Williamson, and Connor Phillips all in-house, any ‘dream’ scenario the Reds may have had likely featured the bulk of their longer-term cornerstones pitching well enough to shoulder the load going forward, a scenario which would’ve led them to feature Montas as a trade chip while not truly taking a step backwards.
That’s the hope now, even though Montas didn’t pitch well enough to bring in an even better return. You can make the argument that the team’s overall pitching staff isn’t even worse after this, and that’s an argument I’ll be very willing to listen to. The Reds sold a little, in other words, but haven’t truly dented a roster that admittedly still needs work to make any sort of run in 2024.
The official trade deadline is later this afternoon. I firmly expect the Reds to attempt to dip their toes in it several more times before time’s up, with a reliever or two out the door and hopefully, mercifully some additional offense above and beyond the previously DFA’d Ty France brought in.
