Though their big league success fizzled out in the Wild Card round against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Cincinnati Reds were boosted by several prominent rookies during their end-of-season playoff push.
Sal Stewart lifted the meager offense with 5 homers across 58 PA to wrap the regular season, while Chase Burns brushed off a forearm issue to return as an elite multi-inning relief option down the stretch. Connor Phillips, meanwhile, finally found a way to harness his elite stuff and became perhaps the single most dominant reliever the Reds leaned on in September – his 0.92 WHIP ranked just behind Emilio Pagan’s 0.917 for the team lead for the season.
Gone is that trio from the status of prospect as a result, as they’ve eached carved out a future as big leaguers. Such is the case across the baseball landscape with all 30 franchises, and FanGraphs put together their end-of-season updated Top 100 overall list over the weekend to reflect those changes.
A trio of future Reds made the cut, highlighted by catcher Alfredo Duno. He rose all the way up to the #20 overall prospect, per Eric Longenhagen, falling into the same 55 Future Value tier as #8 overall prospect Colt Emerson of the Seattle Mariners. Duno, who wont yet turn 20 until January, destroyed Florida State League pitching to the tune of .287/.430/.518 in 495 PA, socking 18 homers and walking more often (95) than he struck out (91). There’s not a category on the offensive leaderboards in that pitching-friendly league where he did not feature prominently, all that coming while finally showing on a regular basis that he can hold down the defensive duties required behind the plate.
Joining Duno are a pair of righties who have already sniffed the big leagues in Chase Petty (#52) and Rhett Lowder (#79), though Lowder’s call-up came at the tail end of 2024 while his 2025 season was almost entirely lost due to injury. Despite the gap in their rankings, both fell into Longenhagen’s same 50 FV tier, with both being tabbed as ‘Low-Variance No. 4 Starters,’ something that’s a pretty feasible assertion given what we’ve seen from them so far. Petty has a bit more stuff than Lowder, but hasn’t been able to control it (or lean into it) in his extremely small sample, while Lowder’s command – which is very much his calling card – didn’t play up in his first foray against Major League hitters. Still plenty of upside with both, but they’ve not yet shown it over a sustained period.
There have certainly been times when the Reds have littered these lists with more overall prospects, but it’s always worth paying attention as much to those who just missed the parameters when evaluating the entirety of the system at any given moment. Burns, Sal, and Phillips are every bit as big a part of the next half-dozen years of Reds baseball as Duno, with Burns, Sal, and Petty all having been born in 2003 despite their specific designations.
As for Duno and Lowder, both will be part of Cincinnati’s contingent on the Peoria Javelinas in Arizona Fall League play, which begins tonight at 9:30 PM ET.
