CINCINNATI — The Reds are ready to make noise this offseason.
The rumblings began in earnest Wednesday night when they brought back closer Emilio Pagan on a two-year, $20 million deal, with Pagan able to opt out after the first year.
It’s a reasonable deal for the Reds who still have dreams of addressing the other major need on their roster, which of course is a power bat. The Reds finished 21st in the Majors in 2025 in slugging and home runs.
The rumors still continue that the Reds are in on free agent Kyle Schwarber, who will likely require an outlay of about $120 million over four years to bring the Middletown native back home and play in the park he grew up cheering for the Reds.
Schwarber would be a massive coup for the Nick Krall administration at Great American Ball Park. For a small-budget team, it would represent pushing all chips to the middle of the table with a roster that has Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, Noelvi Marte, Spencer Steer, Tyler Stephenson and Sal Stewart either in their primes or just entering the sweet spot of their careers.
If not Schwarber, the Reds are still reportedly pursuing options such as re-signing designated hitter Miguel Andujar or acquiring 30-year-old Jake Meyers from Houston as an everyday centerfielder.
“We’re working on it. We’re working through the offseason and figuring out who’s out there and what everyone costs,” Reds President of Baseball Operations Nick Krall said. “We’ll see what the prices are, both on the trade market and the free agent market.”
But Wednesday was significant for another reason altogether. The Reds have stockpiled arms, both in the rotation and in the bullpen that give them every chance to compete with the elite-tier teams in the National League. Pagan was 2-4 with a 2.88 ERA, appearing in 70 games. He converted a career 32 saves in 38 chances. But the number that really stands out is his WHIP of 0.917, the second-lowest of his nine-year career. He will turn 35 in May but the Reds are banking on him being a stabilizing force, both on the mound at the end of games and in the clubhouse.
“I’m super excited, and yeah, it was a pretty easy choice to come back,” Pagan said. “I like everything that we got going on here, and so I knew this is where I wanted to be.”
Pagan returns to a staff where he is not only the elder stateman but a true and valued leader of young arms in the pen.
“That’s something that I’ve kind of embraced since I was in like, ninth or 10th grade,” Pagan said. “I feel like I’ve always been a guy who can communicate with my teammates in many different ways. There’s some things that make guys get real excited, and those same things might piss off somebody else. And so you have to learn, like, how to communicate with with each individual.
And I think that that as as confident as I, as I am as a pitcher, I feel like I’m better at that side of the game, to be completely honest. And so it’s something that I enjoy. It’s something that I look forward to, is talking to people and seeing if there’s anything I can do to help them become better versions of themselves, which then ultimately leads to a better version of the team that I’m on. And so like you said, we’ve got a ton of super talented young guys, specifically in the bullpen that I’m going to get to play with, and get to be around and watch them grow and and hopefully turn into dominant, consistent big leaguers for this franchise. And if I can play a little bit of part in that then, that’d be awesome.”
As for the end of 2025 and the Reds making the playoffs, Pagan said it did play a big factor in his desire to return.
“Obviously, it played a factor, the same way it did when I signed here after the ’23 season,” Pagan told me. “I’ve said this a few times, I’m a baseball fan, and so during that ’23 season, you saw these young guys come up, and I’m watching highlights every night, and it seemed to kind of consistently be Reds highlights there for a long stretch of that summer. And now, having been here with these guys, they’ve turned into some of my best friends. I talked to these guys every day. For the most part, I’m talking to somebody on this team checking in, talking smack about fantasy football, all kinds of stuff. And so, I knew this is where I wanted to be. I think last year was just scratching the surface of what what we can become.”
Could Pagan have squeezed a little more out of the stone in free agency? Sure. But in the end, that wasn’t Pagan objective entering free agency.
“I said this at the end of the year too, and might have shot myself in the foot a little bit, but, like, I don’t play, I don’t play baseball because of the money,” Pagan admitted. “The money is great and it, it provides a lot of things that I can do in my life, for my family and for other people. But, I wasn’t that concerned with the market, to be honest. I do owe a little bit to the game and to future players, to get you know what the game may dictate that I’m worth given what I’ve done. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to make a decision based on who was giving me the most money. I wanted to go somewhere where I felt comfortable, where I felt like I had a chance to win games and be around a special group of people, and Cincinnati checks all three of those boxes.”
“It was our number one choice to bring him back,” Krall added. “We had to get to the beginning of the offseason, end of the season, and had to figure out what our payroll and budget was, and then we started working from there.”
Pagan never got the chance to pitch in the playoffs this past season, a two-game sweep at the hands of the Dodgers. But had he gotten in, he felt he was hitting his stride with his split-finger fastball, a weapon pitch he had spent a good portion of the last several seasons crafting.
“I really started to learn how to use my splitter last year, and it’s been a relatively new pitch for me,” Pagan said. “I just started throwing it kind of halfway through 2022 I started 22 with a splitter, but it was a completely different grip. It was more like a traditional four ball, and then it’s kind of changed into, like a split change over the years, and the grip has kind of continually changed. And then DJ (Derek Johnson) and Matt Tracy and and Simon (Mathews), who was here last year, we’ve all we kind of just tinkered with it through, like, pregame bullpens and stuff.
“I didn’t get to throw in the Dodger series in the playoffs. But if I felt like it was finally like at a point where I knew the movement, what the Movement was going to be, because there was times during the year where even though the results on it were good, the movement pattern of it was was a little bit inconsistent. And so I finally felt like I got to a point where I know what the action on the pitch is going to be, and if you know which way the ball is going to move, it’s a lot easier to throw it where you want to. And so for me, it’s just staying consistent with that pitch. I feel like I’ve got an elite fastball, if not the best, one of the best in the game. And that’s always going to be my bread and butter. But the splitter has, in my opinion, changed the way that I can attack both left handed and right handed hitters. And so for me, it’s just diving into being more and more consistent with that.”
The starting rotation is set with Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, Brady Singer and Chase Burns. Rhett Lowder figures to be in the mix. Then there’s Graham Ashcraft, Connor Phillips, Chase Petty, Tony Santillan, Sam Moll and now Pagan is back at the back-end. The Reds are in a good spot.
That spot will go from good to great if they can reel in a big fish.
