Will he actually break camp with the club is another question.
The Cincinnati Reds have made a waiver claim on right-hander Roansy Contreras, landing the former Top 100 overall prospect off waivers. He’d been placed there by the Texas Rangers a week ago as procedure following the club designating him for assignment, with Texas having previously claimed Contreras off waivers from the Los Angeles Angels at the end of October.
If you follow Top 100 overall prospect lists, you run into players like Contreras time and time again - talented guys who get promoted rapidly but just don’t catch on at the big league level as teams would hope. As a result, their trio of options get burned out early, and they end up getting stuck in an odd transaction spiral because teams can’t simply send them back to AAA anymore.
Such has become the case for Contreras, out of options despite still being just 25 years of age. He was once a major piece of the deal that sent Jameson Taillon to the New York Yankees, and he broke into the big leagues in 2021 with Pittsburgh with a 3.0 IP cup of coffee. The following year was mostly promising as he fired 95.0 IP of 3.79 ERA/4.38 FIP ball for the Pirates, but the 96.6 mph average fastball velocity he flashed in 2021 had dipped a full mph.
The 2023 season saw another 1.5 mph shaved off that number, and he was absolutely shelled for 50 ER in just 68.1 IP (with 11 dingers served up). As the struggles continued to begin the 2024 season, Pittsburgh DFA’d him in mid-May, and his roster jumping has commenced in earnest since then.
Perhaps the Reds have long thought of him as a guy they could ‘fix.’ After all, he ranked as the #71 overall prospect on MLB Pipeline’s pre-2022 list, with guys you may have heard of like Elly De La Cruz (76), Jarren Duran (85), and Matt McLain (87) ranked just behind him. Of course, Joey Weimer (100) was on that list, too, and we’ve already seen him mushed around the league as roster fodder, too.
It’s a depth move, in all likelihood, one that the Reds will hope to leverage into an opportunity to pass him through waivers and to AAA to ‘fix’ there, in an ideal situation. For now, he’ll hold a roster spot until the Reds find someone slightly more worthy and kick the can down the road.
