It’s been a dismal season for the Reds, but it doesn’t sound as though fans should brace for sweeping changes in the front office or the dugout. President of baseball operations Nick Krall tells Gordon Wittenymyer of the Cincinnati Enquirer that he’s already had conversations with ownership and does not anticipate major changes in the baseball ops department or in the dugout.
Krall currently stands to enter his seventh season as the team’s lead baseball operations executive. He’d previously served as the team’s No. 2 executive behind then-president of baseball operations Dick Williams. Krall held the title of general manager from 2020-23, until he was extended and promoted to president of baseball ops nearly three years ago (Sept. 29, 2023). That promotion for Krall coincided with a promotion for then-assistant GM Brad Meador, who was elevated to the title of general manager. Krall and Meador have been the team’s clear-cut No. 1 and No. 2 baseball ops execs for three years now.
In the dugout, future Hall of Famer Terry Francona is wrapping up his second season as skipper. The Reds beat expectations with an 83-79 season last year, narrowly securing the final Wild Card spot in the process. They were quickly dispatched by the eventual World Series-champion Dodgers with a decisive 2-0 sweep in the three-game Wild Card round of postseason play.
This year’s Reds entered the season with bigger expectations. They of course made the postseason last year, and their offseason saw them bring in Eugenio Suárez to bolster the offense in addition to several additions to strengthen the relief staff; Emilio Pagán was re-signed to a two-year contract on the back of a strong 2025 showing, while veterans Pierce Johnson, Brock Burke and Caleb Ferguson were acquired via free agency (Johnson, Ferguson) or trade (Burke). A pair of small-scale additions who’d been non-tendered by their prior clubs — Nathaniel Lowe and JJ Bleday — were signed on the cheap and paid major dividends early on before fading as the summer progressed.
The downturn in production for Lowe and Bleday was in many ways a microcosm of the Reds’ overall season. Cincinnati was 20-11 at the end of April but has had just one winning month since (a 13-12 showing in July). The Reds went 10-17 in May and never recovered. They’re 50-69 over their past 119 contests. Even with a breakout performance from 2024 No. 2 overall pick Chase Burns, the pitching staff has disappointed. Hunter Greene barely pitched before requiring his second Tommy John surgery. Nick Lodolo has been limited to 19 starts and has an ERA north of 5.00 with poor grades from fielding-independent metrics. Andrew Abbott has the worst rate stats of his career and barely has an ERA under 5.00. Brady Singer has been healthy and eaten innings but has a 5.38 ERA as of this writing.
The offense has been similarly problematic. Sal Stewart might win NL Rookie of the Year. Elly De La Cruz is having the best season of his career and will get some down-ballot MVP votes. That’s where the positives largely stop. Suárez’s return hasn’t panned out. TJ Friedl looks like a non-tender candidate, and Matt McLain isn’t far behind. Bleday hasn’t hit since June. Lowe was traded to the Guardians after the Reds’ season slipped away. Tyler Stephenson needed a huge post-deadline hot streak to push himself to a league-average batting line. Spencer Steer was only about league-average before suffering a torn tendon sheath in his right wrist that ended his season. Former top prospect Noelvi Marte hasn’t hit a lick, nor have current in-house top prospects Edwin Arroyo and Hector Rodriguez. Stephenson, notably, is a free agent at season’s end.
Suffice it to say, there are major changes that need to be made on this roster if the Reds are to return to contention. Reds fans — and fans throughout the sport — have wondered whether it’ll be Krall, Meador & Co. making the decisions on those changes. It’s a fair question on which to speculate after six seasons with only one playoff appearance, but it seems the Castellini family ownership group is confident it has the proper decisionmakers in place.
Krall’s front office will need to bolster a rotation that currently projects to have only one above-average starter, the aforementioned Burns. Abbott and Lodolo are talented lefties but haven’t pitched well this year and both have injury histories. Singer is a free agent coming off one of the healthiest but also least-effective seasons of his career.
Singer, in particular, stood as a clear trade candidate at the deadline. He’s struggled badly in the seven weeks since the deadline, but at the time he was a veteran on a non-contending club that had been on a hot streak. Singer’s 4.68 ERA entering the deadline wasn’t much to look at, but he’d fired off ten starts (56 2/3 innings) with a 3.34 ERA and good rate stats leading into the deadline, giving some confidence that he’d rediscovered his more solid 2024-25 form.
The Reds rather surprisingly chose to hang onto Singer with the idea of extending him a qualifying offer that’s going to cost around $23MM. He’s followed the deadline with his worst stretch of the season. In his past nine starts, Singer has totaled 47 1/3 innings with a gruesome 7.23 ERA.
Despite that slump and the poor overall season numbers, Wittenmyer writes that the team still expects to make Singer the qualifying offer, valuing the durability he provides. The Reds took a similar approach with Nick Martinez a few years ago, though Martinez had performed at a better level than Singer. Clearly, the team values having some steady innings and knows those are hard to acquire in free agency, as their immensely homer-friendly park is a turnoff for some of the more desirable arms on the market — even among older veterans seeking fairly short term commitments. It’s hard to imagine Singer rejecting the QO, which would eat up quite a bit of the team’s offseason budget — assuming there’s no major payroll increase in store, anyhow.
Krall said ahead of the deadline that his intent was retool for the 2027 season but not embark on any kind of lengthy rebuild. He offered similar comments to Wittenmyer this week, touting a core that includes Burns, De La Cruz and Stewart. The Reds need more than just a few complementary role players to fully take advantage of that excellent group. They have $39.75MM committed to five players next year: Burns, Greene, Pagán, Ke’Bryan Hayes and Jose Trevino. (Greene, of course, won’t pitch much or at all following that UCL repair in August.) That number climbs to almost $63MM if Singer accepts a QO.
A look at MLBTR’s Payroll Tracker shows arb raises will be coming for Lodolo, Abbott, De La Cruz, Steer, Bleday, Graham Ashcraft, Tony Santillan and Dane Myers, among others. The Reds will need to add another starter, multiple outfielders, bullpen help and a new starting catcher at the very least. They could use more infield certainty, but this year’s $126MM payroll was already a club record. There might not be a ton of room to add to the roster, which would necessitate continuing to rely on rebounds from Hayes and/or McLain. It’s a long list of problems to address — one which Krall plainly tells Wittenmyer falls squarely on his own shoulders:
“You can make all the excuses you want, but at the end of the day we haven’t done what we set out to do, and we’ve got to figure out how to do a better job going into next year. … I oversee baseball operations, so it’s on me.”
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