Tejay Antone’s recovery and return from his third Tommy John surgery will apparently remain within the ranks of the Cincinnati Reds organization.
On Friday, MLB.com’s Mark Sheldon announced that Antone
and the Reds had reached an agreement on a minor league deal, though it’s not yet officially ‘official.’ That would mark his return to the club after he elected free agency back on November 6th alongside nineteen other former members of the Reds minors ranks.
The Reds drafted Tejay in the 5th round way back in 2014, and this organization is all he’s known since. He’ll turn 32 in December, but the innards of his elbow are in many ways much, much younger than that.
Antone first dealt with Tommy John surgery way back in 2017, and he’s had the procedure twice more in the last four years. That puts him in rarified air in terms of making a return to the big leagues, as only two others – Jason Isringhausen and Jonny Venters – have ever made it all the way back to the top level in the world after suffering through that particular surgery a trio of times.
Antone made it back to the AAA level at the tail end of the 2025 regular season after having been sidelined altogether since April of 2024, and while the end result numbers were awful – 17 ER acros 15.0 IP split between AAA Louisville, AA Chattanooga, and A+ Dayton – he was back up to throwing 95 mph and, most importantly, his arm was working as originally designed. That has prompted a lot of optimism that a normal offseason of rest and ramp-up instead of having to rehab furiously may well set him up for a much, much better series of outcomes in 2026.
That would be an incredible boon to the Reds, who have turned over a huge portion of their bullpen from the 2025 season. Scott Barlow, Emilio Pagan, Nick Martinez, and Brent Suter all reached free agency, and the spendthrift Reds don’t have immediate piles of coin to address those spots by signing big-ticket free agents. So, they’re going to likely rely on pieces within their organization to take significant steps forward, and Antone becoming healthy again would be a massive, massive step in that vein.
I’m happy for Tejay, frankly, and hope this miracle return continues to progress to a point where having him on the mound in GABP again is more than just pure nostalgia. The baseball gods owe him, if nothing else.
