Free agency doesn’t officially begin until the day after the World Series ends. Even then, it’s not exactly real free agency as teams have five days from that point to be the exclusive negotiators with players who are now free agents who were also on their team this past season. After those five days are up if players have not agreed to a new contract then they can become true free agents and negotiate with all teams unless they are extended a qualifying offer during that. I don’t remember the last time a player agreed to a new deal before testing the true free agent waters within that 5-day “exclusive negotiating” period of time.
The Cincinnati Reds have a handful of players who are set to become free agents in the next two weeks. Today we are going to start a series to look at these players and discuss whether it makes sense for the club to try and bring them back. Our first piece is going to look out Miguel Andujar.
His time in Cincinnati was short. Cincinnati traded for him at the trade deadline, acquiring him from the Atheltics in a deal that saw the Reds send prospect Kenya Huggins the other way in the swap.
In his time in the American League this season Andujar was having far and away his best season since he was a rookie with the New York Yankees back in 2018. The outfielder was hitting .298/.329/.436 – good for an OPS+ of 111 (which essentially means after adjusting for the ballparks he played in he had an OPS that was 11% better than the league average).
After he joined the Reds he essentially served as the team’s designated hitter. Part of that was due to his limited defensive abilities, but part of it was also due to the fact that he was dealing with quad injury for much of time with Cincinnati. He was healthy enough to hit but they weren’t going to ask him to run much in order to protect the injury and keep his bat available. Still, that limited him to 34 games between August and September.
When he was on the field, though, he hit very well. With Cincinnati he hit .359/.400/.544 with a 153 OPS+. He was the team’s best hitter during that time, but he only played about 60% of the time due to his injury and the Reds going with a bit of a mix-and-match situation with what is probably half of their positions that included the designated hitter.
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