If you posted a .364 OBP during the 2025 Major League Baseball season, you were in pretty elite company. Among the 108 MLB players who logged at least 550 PA last season, that number would’ve sandwiched you right between perennial All Star Jose Ramirez (.360) and slugger Kyle Schwarber (.365). The small number of names ahead of that mark is the who’s who of the sport – Ohtani, Tatis, Freeman, Soto, Judge, etc.
That was just last season! The Cincinnati Reds aren’t even 80 games into this season! It’s
all such a recent memory, isn’t it?
The baseball world evolves incredibly fast, however. That .364 OBP from 2025? That’s precisely the mark posted by TJ Friedl in his most recent full season, and last year he served as a perfectly good on-base machine and run scorer atop the lineup for a club that actually participated in postseason baseball.
You’d think a guy like that would have some value, especially since he’s just making $3.8 million this season and comes with two additional years of team control through the arbitration process. If the Reds had tried trading him over the winter with that kind of profile – he even got down-ballot MVP votes in 2023, all as a player playing CF – you’d think there would’ve been a number of teams jumping at the opportunity.
When I posed the question earlier in the week whether you thought Friedl had played his last game in a Reds uniform, very little of all that seemed to matter anymore. An overwhelming 68% percent of respondents think Friedl’s time with the Reds at the big league level is effectively over, the litany of complicating administrative and roster issues hanging over his head right now too much for his recent poor play to overcome.
Poor play is putting it mildly. From the heights of his OBP prowess in 2025 he fell to just .179/.259/.256 (.515 OPS) in 178 PA to start 2026 before the Reds mercifully optioned him to AAA.
He’s almost 31 and his speed has evaporated. With little power to his game, speed – and the good defense that supported – were two key aspects of his game that don’t seem to be there any longer. If that means he’s a LF now – which the Reds pretty much admitted in-game early this season – that’s an overall profile that doesn’t really work. Now, he’s been passed on the OF depth chart by the likes of JJ Bleday, Noelvi Marte, Blake Dunn, and Dane Myers, with Spencer Steer still very much an option in LF, and the idea of keeping that player around on an arbitration raise over the $3.8 million he’s making right now seems impossible on Cincinnati’s budget.
Barring serious injury elsewhere, he’s not getting called back up anytime soon, and we’re now just over 5 weeks from the MLB trade deadline on August 3rd. If the Reds aren’t going to keep him around and tender him a contract at season’s end, they might as well try to trade him to someone who’s willing to take a flyer on him, and that means there’s precious few games in which Friedl would actually have a chance to make a return to Cincinnati.
Maybe that’s not how it plays out. Maybe they sell other pieces at the deadline (seeing as they’re once again in last place), and that opens a path back for him to finish the season at the big league level if he turns it around down in Louisville. Then, the Reds could shop him for something this winter. At this rate, though, that sure seems unplausible.
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