A trade concept I hate, but this is the Reds we’re talking about

Thanksgiving is in the rear-view mirror, and that launches us firmly into the Hot Stove season across Major League Baseball with the Winter Meetings set to take place December 7th through 10th down in Orlando, Florida.

It’s a time of little concrete activity, but the next week and a half will feature teams doing their best to set their budget expectations for 2026 and firmly establish what they need – and what they have to move – in order to best match their roster to their expectation for the upcoming season. The revival in Orlando will then be the first real chance to hobnob with their rival peers in person and begin to make some serious deals.

The Cincinnati Reds are in the fortunate position of a) having been decent in 2025, b) boasting a roster with some really good top-end talent, and c) controlling some enviable pitching. They need offense, obviously, and they’re entering the offseason with their predictably cries of austerity and shoestring budget needs, two complicating factors when it comes to trying to fix this roster in a thorough fashion.

Nick Deeds of MLB Trade Rumors explored the needs and pursuits on the Reds ledger this winter, sourcing from a trio of the staff writers at The Athletic. In it he points out that much of the Reds current core has positional versatility going for it, which bakes in some pretty decent flexibility when it comes to targets for hitting upgrades this winter. Sal Stewart can play all over the infield, Spencer Steer has LF/1B up his sleeve, you can try to hide Gavin Lux in a number of places, etc. Yet there was one name he brought up in detail as a key part of the Reds going forward who, despite my best efforts, increasingly looks like a guy the Reds should maybe consider cashing in on in trade sooner rather than later.

Consider this in anonymity until you get my gist, if you will.

He’s seen his sprint speed drop from the 74th percentile in 2023 down to the 26th percentile during a leg-injury riddled 2024, and that only bumped back up to the 32nd percentile in 2025. He once swiped 27 bags in a season (2023), but that dipped to just 12 in 2025 despite almost 130 more PA – one part a change of managerial direction, one part likely obvious from the tidbits of the first part of this paragraph. He also saw his slugging peak at .467 during that healthy 2023, and it’s dropped to just .379 in over 1000 PA since. He’ll turn 31 during August of next season, and he’s reached arbitration on the back of enough speed and dinger numbers that he’s expected to jump from earning league-minimum salaries in each of the last three seasons to some $4.9 million for the 2026 season.

He plays a premium defensive position, yet his arm value and range metrics have dipped drastically since his injuries. He’s been an on-base machine with walk rates rising and pretty elite strike zone coverage, the calling card that led him to being a 2.9 fWAR/2.3 bWAR player in 2025.

It’s TJ Friedl we’re talking about here, which I’m sure you long figured out. He is, in many ways, the Cincinnati Reds personified – overlooked on draft day, scooped up somewhat on the sly, small in stature but greater than the sum of his parts, and a relentless and rock-solid player when not injured (who, sadly, has been injured a good bit). He’s also a quintessential Red in that he never got a contract extension to set his rates, and here I am now wondering how he’s anything other than precisely the kind of player the Reds should be shopping this winter given literally everything they preach about their threadbare coffers and commitment to going young.

Hitting 30 with hamstring injuries that have clearly impacted two of his most vital tools is a worry. The escalating salary, to the Reds at least, is a complication. Still, there is seemingly ample value in what tools he still has (and has improved upon), and it’s hard not to wonder if he’d be precisely the kind of piece who – if paired with, perhaps, one of their arms – could both shed some salary and bring in some pretty damn elite talent that’s not slated to make about $5 million bucks during the 2026 season. The Baltimore Orioles, for example, seem like precisely the kind of club who’d be looking for both of those things.

On paper it seems idiotic and asinine to suggest that the Reds should trade the guy who was pretty obviously their second best offensive player last year in a time when they need to be upgrading their offense. The same could well have been said about Jonathan India last year. I get that, and it’s not a wrong take – this is me doing my best to view things through the lens of those running the Reds, however. Clearly, the bulk of their mantra for how to improve their offense for 2026 isn’t replace those who were bad in 2025, it’s do what we can to make sure they are better in 2026.

They’re already banking on Matt McLain, Sal Stewart, Elly De La Cruz, Noelvi Marte, and Spencer Steer to be better next year as the driving force that will fuel their offensive improvements, not ‘sign Kyle Schwarber and Pete Alonso.’ Reading everything they say about this roster, they want Friedl to only be the fourth, fifth, or sixth best offensive player on the 2026 Reds – not because he got significantly worse, but because the underperformers around him got better. The young Reds got better, if you will, and through this lens the Reds wouldn’t be trading away their second best offensive player, they’d be trading away their fourth, fifth, or sixth best – and getting cheaper and younger in the process.

It’s convoluted, and it involves one of my favorite Reds, so I’ve not committed myself to this bit by any means. The 2026 Reds can and would be better with Friedl in the fold in almost every scenario that involves them actually spending more than bottom-tier payroll, but we know how non-negotiable that latter clause truly is with this club. That means they will treat this like a business first, and do so with the need to get creative at times, and it’s enough to lead my brain in this particularly uncomfortable direction.