Luis Castillo is under team control by the Cincinnati Reds for two more years. So, too, are Sonny Gray and Tyler Mahle, the names we’ve most often seen shopped around trade rumors since the end of the 2021 Major League Baseball season as the Reds appear to be very obviously scaling back their spending.
Those signals reached ‘spotlight on the marquee’ levels with the deals to dump both Tucker Barnhart and Wade Miley just hours after the end of the World Series, one a trade to save as much coin as possible, one a waiver dump. And while the initial assumption/hope was that they were simply trying to save as much coin as possible while trying to field something relevant in 2022, the reality probably goes much, much deeper than that.