The deadline to tender contracts to all players in their pre-arbitration and arbitration years is this Friday evening, and it gives a perennial glimpse into how teams operate their budgets at the margins.
Almost by definition, pre-arb and arb players aren’t truly ‘expensive’ just yet. They are either gaining enough service time to finally get decent raises, or they’ve already reached that point with enough past production to warrant what they’re currently being paid. Each year, though, the top free
agents consistently earn 25 to 50% more per year than even the most expensive arb-eligible guys, so it’s hard to truly commit to the bit of calling any arb-eligible player truly overpriced.
Still, when players in their arb years don’t continue to improve with their escalating price tags, that’s when the non-tender deadline comes into play. A 4.80 ERA and bulk innings is a fine thing to have floating around the back of the roster when it’s coming at league minimum, for instance, but once that starts to cost 2, 4, 6 million bucks, that’s the kind of player who’ll get lopped off a roster and into free agency.
The same can somewhat be said of a hitter who doesn’t have a defensive position yet still posted just a 97 OPS+ last year. A guy who only slugs .374 despite playing in perhaps the most homer-prone stadium in the game but doesn’t defend any position well seems like precisely the kind of thing you can find for league-minimum somewhere in your minor league system, and that’s a valuable active roster spot you could otherwise use for someone who at least excels in one area of the game, at minimum.
When that player is projected to make some $5 million in 2026, well, said decision really begins to look pretty obvious. That’s exactly the scenario in which the Cincinnati Reds and Gavin Lux are this Friday, as the veteran left-handed-hitter-sans-position is projected to earn precisely that amount in 2026, his final year of team control. And how the Reds choose to handle this decision just 10 months after trading a top draft pick and current Top 100 overall prospect Mike Sirota for Lux’s services will tell us a ton about how they plan to approach the 2026 season as a whole.
On the surface, nothing suggests a club on such a shoestring budget as the Reds should spent $5 million on a guy who can’t hit well enough nor defend well enough to stake an everyday claim. They’ve got a need for, well, a guy who can hit and defend well enough to stake an everyday claim at an outfield position as well as a need for an entire bullpen, and they don’t (according to them) have enough money laying around to address those needs casually. We effectively already saw a similar decision made with Santiago Espinal when he was waived weeks ago instead of sticking around for nearly $3 million for 2026.
On the other hand, though, this front office has consistently hyped the precise kind of skills that Lux does possess as attributes they target directly, even if those didn’t pan out in the kind of stats most of us point to like SLG, OPS, and WAR. Few things about Lux’s -0.2 bWAR, 0.3 fWAR season really jumps off the page at first glance, but he did hit .269 with a .350 OBP, did walk 11.1% of the time against just a 22.7% K-rate, did at least be listed at enough positions to qualify for the definition of ‘versatile,’ and did hit .282/.361/.400 against RHP.
The Reds have become a team that loves finding players that can do 2/3rds or 3/4ths of most things instead of finding players who can do 1/1 of something concrete. It’s how they operate, love it or not, and Lux fits that mold in many ways. So, how the Reds choose to handle his tender decision today will go a long way towards showing us what they have in mind for this offseason.
Was all he did last year actually good enough? Was it in-line with their expectations?
Will they be reluctant to cut ties now and sell him off into free agency when the cost they spent to acquire him looks worse and worse with every Mike Sirota swing?
Will they really commit to roughly $5 million for the exact same level of expectation on Lux instead of reinvesting that into another player for that roster spot that actually has tangible upside?
To their credit, the Reds have not buried their heads and ignored bad decisions the way that some teams (read: the Colorado Rockies) have in recent years. They aptly declared the likes of Shogo Akiyama, Mike Moustakas, and more recently Jeimer Candelario as sunk costs and moved the hell on, even if the financial hit of those moves stayed with them for years down the road. Moving on from Lux today wouldn’t require that kind of monetary hit, obviously, but it would be an egg-face acknowledgement that Sirota might remind them of for years down the road, and perhaps that brings in a bit more reluctance on their part today.
Maybe Lux can squeak his way to .285/.360/.400 next year, they’ll say to themselves. Maybe a full offseason of learning LF will make him passable there.
They will, or they won’t, but they’ll do so at some point today. And when they do, we’ll learn a whole lot about where their priorities are for this offseason [/coughs out Kyle Schwarber’s name] and what their tolerance for risk truly is.
