A Friday List.
Oft-injured over-30 baseball players making $15 to $18 million per season aren’t exactly the greatest investment for Major League Baseball teams who insist on operating on meager budgets. The Cincinnati Reds know this full well, as lately they’ve been seen deals for the likes of Mike Moustakas and, so far, Jeimer Candelario turn sour before ever taking flight.
Teams who choose to sport more robust budgets can more afford to roll the dice on those guys, however. Pay them what they’ve earned through productive careers in hopes that, perhaps, they get really good, really healthy years every other year or so on the deal - and capitalize on winning in those particular years. The concept there is, of course, that if the player ends up having an injury-plagued year, they’ve got someone else on the payroll good enough to fill in.
That’s why teams keep taking flyers on Michael Conforto, for instance. He’s pretty great when he’s right, but it’s no surprise that it’s big-money teams like San Francisco and the LA Dodgers who choose to take that risk. It’s why the Yankees took the risk on Cody Bellinger in their acquisition of him from Chicago last week.
The Cincinnati Reds do not operate like any of those big-money teams. Overextending their tight budget on a player who has an overwhelming likelihood of not being available for much of the time on their deal simply doesn’t make a ton of sense on that model.
If you’re only going to really pay one player - and that player can’t stay healthy - your entire business plan kind of goes up in flames.
Anyway, we often list here at Red Reporter on Fridays, and today’s is comprised of players who’d be really cool for the Reds to acquire if we existed in a world where they operated with a budget flexible enough to insure against these guys getting hurt and missing time.
The Twins are reportedly above their projected budget, potentially entering a bit of a rebuilding stage, and even listening to offers on Pablo López (who finished 7th in the 2023 AL Cy Young Award voting). The Twins also have a CF who has posted a 132 OPS+ since the start of the 2021 season while also ranking as the 12th best defender by UZR/150 among the 416 players who’ve logged at least 1000 PA in that time.
Byron Buxton turned 31 years old two days ago and is under contract for 4 years and $60.6 million through the 2028 season. He mashed LHP (.859 OPS) and RHP (.859 OPS) equally last year. He is, on a rate-basis, pretty much exactly what the Reds could use in their OF mix for the next four seasons - his 88.6% stolen-base rate is the best among active players, too.
He just rarely ever plays.
The 388 PA he put up last season was the most he’d logged in any year since 2017, when he posted a career high 511 PA. That’s just not at all enough for a team like the Reds, who are looking to thread the needle and find a) the kind of production Buxton puts out there when healthy for b) a salary way less than that that comes with c) way, way less risk.
I’d love for the Reds to trade for Buxton while also accruing enough OF depth around him to stomach losing him for weeks at a time. They aren’t going to do the latter, though, so the former sadly makes little sense.
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Actually, this isn’t really a list. It’s just me pondering just how awesome (and dumb) it would be if the Reds found a way to take Buxton off the Twins. 4/60M for a guy with his upside? Where else are they going to find a player like that this winter for that kind of contract, even if it comes with a spectacular amount of risk that it blows up altogether?
This is a silly exercise, since it won’t happen. It’s just a lot more enjoyable to think about than giving Anthony Santander $80 million over 4 years to put up a grand total of 5 WAR and need to be a full-time DH by year 3 (or to not really do much at all.)
