In lieu of hurling statcast metrics at you at 100 mph and without enough medical expertise to break down the intricacies of recovering from Tommy John surgery and right teres major inflammation, let us merely take a large step back and view the state of the Cincinnati Reds as of today, November 11th.
Their manager, Terry Francona, is a future Hall of Famer thanks to his previous tenures with the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Guardians, the latter being where he resided in the dugout fom 2013 through
the end of the 2023 season.
Their hitting coach, Chris Valaika, was hired by Cleveland when Francona was manager there in 2021, and he served as the Guardians hitting coach until October 2024 – at which point he was hired to coach hitting for the Reds.
Assistant bench coach Mike Napoli played for Francona with Cleveland during the 2016 season, during which time he was teammates with current Reds 1B coach Collin Cowgill.
The most recent hire to Cincinnati’s coaching staff is one Joe Torres, who came to the Reds after a long history coaching within the ranks of the Guardians farm. He was a coach and coordinator in their minor league system from 2017 through 2021, and then served as assistant pitching coach at the big league level from 2022 until being hired last week by the Reds.
It is impossible not to notice the overwhelming thread that is the tie between Tito’s Cleveland years and what he, and the Reds front office, are building in Cincinnati at the moment. It obviously remains to be seen if it’s going to pan out in any form or fashion after 2026’s debacle, but it’s no accident that there has been this level of cohesive adding from the relationships established during Francona’s decade-long run in Cleveland.
As for the Reds heading into 2027, we know several things as basic, inalienable tenets.
We know they’ll be looking to be cheap. That’s simply who they are, and who they’ll continue to be under this current ownership group. That doesn’t mean they won’t try to address serious issues, however, they’ll just attempt to do so as cheaply and without long commitment as possible. That often means trying to sign players at low points in their careers, players coming back from injuries, players looking for a soft landing spot to rebuild their value – potentially players who could be persuaded to join a situation around things they see as comfortable instead of chasing every last penny they could potentially find elsewhere.
We also know they’re going to need pitching. They’ll need relievers, no doubt, but they know they absolutely need to augment their starting pitching staff. They lost staff workhorse Brady Singer to free agency, Hunter Greene’s second Tommy John surgery will keep him out for all of 2027, and starting options like Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, Rhett Lowder, and Chase Petty are all coming off disappointing 2026 campaigns.
We also presumably know that they are going to try to prioritize winning during 2027 in lieu of rebuilding, what with Elly De La Cruz still rostered and the clock ticking furiously until the time will come to trade him for whatever they can get before he walks into free agency. They have Chase Burns, and few teams can boast a hitter/pitcher combination capable of each posting 6 WAR campaigns like that, and you’d like to think you could cobble together a roster around those two that’s at least capable of being competitive.
Given all those knowns, it’s hard to ignore that there’s a former Cy Young Award winner who, at age 31, is a free agent after a series of disappointing years surrounding a Tommy John surgery that set him back, especially given his glory days came during a 7-year stint as a Cleveland Guardian where Francona was his manager and Torres his assistant pitching coach for most of it. It’s hard not to notice that he may be in precisely the kind of situation where he’d like a one-year ‘show me’ contract to re-establish his value before potentially re-entering free agency on a much stronger platform, a guy whose numbers in 2026 were ugly – but much uglier than many of his underlying metrics would suggest they should have been.
It sure seems like Shane Bieber is precisely the pitcher the Reds need to be calling this winter, even though his brief time with the Toronto Blue Jays didn’t go as either had planned. It actually seems like Shane Bieber is precisely the pitcher most of the team’s entire coaching staff probably has had in a group text for years already.
Patterns like this are impossible to ignore. Because of that, it’s hard to ignore that lining up Bieber to help bolster the 2027 Reds rotation seems like more of an inevitability than a shot in the dark at this juncture.
I’m not sure the Reds would be very good poker players.
