On Nick Martinez, the Reds, and the Qualifying Offer decision last winter

The Cincinnati Reds moved Nick Martinez to the bullpen for good on August 29th, citing his versatility and willingness to pitch anywhere at anytime upon making the move.

At that point, he was fresh off being blasted by the Los Angeles Dodgers for 4 ER in 5.1 IP, an outing that had raised his season ERA to 4.67. He’d jumped into the middle of a trio of games as a reliever already in that sample, but the other 26 appearances among those had come as a starter. The latter was, after all, what the Reds hoped to get out of Martinez when they issued him a Qualifying Offer after his brilliant 2024 campaign - starters are much more valuable than relievers over the long haul, right?

Was that really what the Reds hoped for when they issued that QO, though?

At $21.05 million, Martinez is the highest paid player on the club by a large margin. Brady Singer, in his second arbitration year, is taking home $8.75 million as the team’s second-highest earner. For a Reds club that sets strictly austere budget standards, making a bet on a single-season salary of the size of Martinez’s always seemed like a huge gamble, one that would both a) eat up a fifth of their entire budget for the year and b) likely render him un-tradeable at the deadline given how much money he’d have remaining on his deal.

The fact probably is that precisely what the Reds hoped they’d get out of Martinez on the day they issued him the QO is him saying no thanks, I’d rather try free agency.

It’s not that they didn’t want him around at all, of course. He’s been insanely durable, flexible, willing and able throughout his tenure with Cincinnati in 2024 and 2025, a known leader and - at times - well above average pitcher. But this club aims to buy bargains and get them to way outperform their contracts or simply find pre-arb players who aren’t yet expensive, for the most part, and doling out the kind of cash it took to keep Martinez around meant they were forced - by their own in-house budget complaints/constraints - to hope that he’d somehow, some way give them a season that was significantly better than he’d ever had before.

That, sadly, simply has not happened.

That’s not Nick’s fault, mind you. He’s led the team in IP all season - his 159.1 IP to date are already the highest in a season of his career - and he’s taken the ball on every number of day’s rest as the likes of Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, Chase Burns, Rhett Lowder, Brandon Williamson, and Wade Miley have battled their own injuries all season. He’s been the team’s Band-Aid, and a perfectly league-average one at that - he owns a 101 ERA+ so far this year and both Baseball Reference and FanGraphs have valued him as exactly a 2-win player.

The irony here is that he’s precisely the kind of pitcher that’s perfect for a full playoff series. Short rest, short warmups, putting out fires, and not being at an innings limit at season’s end are all major requirements for pitching in October, and he profiles perfectly as that - if the Reds could have ever gotten him to that point.

The decision to issue Martinez a QO is exactly what every team in baseball should have done in the same position last winter after he pitched well enough to deserve to opt-out of the latter year of his previous contract. The Boston Red Sox would have done it, the Philadelphia Phillies would have done it, the San Diego Padres, Arizona Diamondbacks, and St. Louis Cardinals would have done it. And, if he’d accepted it from those teams, those teams would have taken the increase in cost in stride and found ways to invest around him anyway.

The Reds didn’t really do that, though.

They needed an everday outfielder to anchor the offense, yet didn’t chase any of the handful of those available in either free agency or by trade. Instead, they settled on Austin Hays, who’s been equally just fine himself when available, but the same injury issues that kept him sidelined for weeks in previous years have similarly kept him shelved far too often this year, too.

They definitely needed another reliever of prominence, especially with the question marks surrounding Alexis Diaz after he sputtered so bad down the stretch in 2024. They didn’t really go get one of those, either, instead attempting to shift guys up the ladder (like Emilio Pagan) and backfill with the likes of Scott Barlow, all while leaning on rookies (Lyon Richardson, Connor Phillips) and Graham Ashcraft in a totally new role.

Those moves - Hays and the bullpen consortium - have been fine, but not paid off in spades. Hays has been Hays when healthy, but not healthy enough, and the bullpen (27th in FIP, 26th in BB/9) has been sub-par and fading as it leans way too heavily on the likes of Barlow and Tony Santillan every single night.

As the Reds slip back under .500 and all thoughts of making a postseason run in 2025 fade, it’s worth looking back at how this club was put together, what worked and what did not, and why the decisions made then didn’t end up paying off now.

This isn’t a Nick Martinez problem, as I’ve said before. His contract and similar production doesn’t make you blink if Elly De La Cruz broke out for a ~7-8 WAR season the way we all hoped and carried the offense out of mediocrity, or if Matt McLain and Spencer Steer were anything close to average bats. Nobody cares about Nick’s move to the bullpen if Chase Burns doesn’t have a hurt forearm and shot straight to the top of the rotation alongside Greene - and we’re not talking about ‘missing the playoffs’ if Greene hadn’t missed months again, too.

Still, while I applauded the Reds for being bold enough to issue the QO to Martinez after he opted-out of his previous deal last winter, I wondered loudly at the time if they were prepared to do what was necessary if he decided to accept it. The rest of the offseason moves sure made it look like they weren’t, and their unwillingess to find more resources to surround it made a path to the playoffs in 2025 available through only two routes - either threading the needle perfectly, or banking on breakouts from more players (at the same time) than was truly ever going to happen.

The Reds, as we’ve seen in September, haven’t been able to thread that needle, and the breakouts simply never came.

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