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Charlie Goldsmith, former Enquirer reporter (and current purveyor of Charlie’s Chalkboard on Substack), caught up with Cincinnati Reds manager Terry Francona at MLB’s Winter Meetings in Orlando, picking the future Hall of Famer’s mind on a number of topics ranging from Kyle Schwarber to managing the overall roster of the club through the grind of a full season.
While the most fun nuggets of that conversation revolve around the idea that the Reds might have a chance to land the slugging Schwarber, there are more tangible notes about the players already on-roster and what the Reds can do to get the most out of them going forward. Some of that, at least in Francona’s mind, needs to come through getting his most key players a few more days off over the course of the year, with shortstop Elly De La Cruz and CF TJ Friedl chief among them.
Francona praised Friedl for playing as much as he did last season, making 148 starts in center field. There were times where the Reds simply didn’t have a backup center fielder on the roster.
The Reds need more consistent center field depth in 2026. That could come with a more consistent year from Will Benson, who hasn’t been an impact defender in center but can man the spot. It also could come from an addition.
Francona has also asked Noelvi Marte to shag fly balls in center field. Even if Marte doesn’t play there, it’s good to work on chasing fly balls down from both sides.
Finding depth in CF to allow for Friedl to get a minute here and there seems like something the Reds are keenly interested in discovering this winter, and that brings us to Houston Astros CF Jake Meyers. He’s firmly on the trade block this winter as the Astros try to revamp their own roster, and Brian McTaggart of MLB.com relayed yesterday that the Reds are one of the clubs who has expressed interest.
First, let’s lay out the Meyers basics.
He’s a plus runner who’s even elite at times. He ranked in the 89th percentile in sprint speed in 2024 before dropping to just the 71st in 2025, though a calf injury sidelined him for a pair of months and clearly impacted that a bit. He’s also a tremendously rangy defender, ranking in the 95th percentile in Range (OAA) in 2025 and 97th percentile the year before. He’s fresh off a 2025 season in which he posted a career-best 103 OPS+, and that paired with his defense saw him valued at 2.4 bWAR/2.3 fWAR.
He’s 29 and will turn 30 in June, and he’s got two more years of team control. He’s estimated to take down a $3.5 million salary in 2026 via arbitration.
If the Reds were to acquire Meyers and have him replicate his 2025 season, he’d be worth every penny, and more. The questions, though, are both whether that’s a realistic expectation of him at this point as well as what the Reds would choose to do with Friedl (and on down the dominos) if Meyers were acquired.
For a team on a budget like the Reds, you don’t simply trade valuable pieces off the farm for a guy only to pay him $3.5 million and then not be a regular. If you go get Meyers as the Reds, you put him in CF more often than not. That doesn’t mean every single inning of every single game, obviously – Meyers only logged 381 PA in 104 G last year and has only topped that number of PA in a season once in five years in the bigs. So, you’d think TJ Friedl would still be very much a ‘part’ of the CF mix, but given that Meyers likely is the superior defender of the two at this juncture of their careers, that would probably slide TJ over to LF a lot, too.
That begs further questions. Is bringing in Meyers at the cost (both in prospects and salary) to bolster the CF depth chart worth it? Is TJ Friedl, himself a plus offensive player in CF who can still capably man it defensively when not ground to a pulp, a good enough offensive player to warrant playing a corner OF spot more often than not? Is a Meyers CF, Friedl LF outfield pairing really a better use of resources than simply keeping TJ in CF, signing a bigger bat for LF, and, say, letting Blake Dunn simply roll around the corner of the roster as CF depth?
That likely comes down to your expectations of Meyers, who was never close to as good offensively in his first four years in the bigs as he was in 2025.
In 1177 PA across 2021-2024, he hit just .228/.292/.371 (85 OPS+), numbers that seem much more accurate given his lower-level minors performance before reaching the AAA launching pads of the Pacific Coast League. Across that 2021-2024 sample, he posted a combined .290 BABIP despite his elite speed, with a .283 mark in 341 PA in 2023 and .263 mark in 513 PA in 2024 (his biggest single-season sample size to date). In his ‘breakout’ 2025, though, he put up an outlier .353 BABIP – the 9th highest among the 242 MLB players with at least 350 PA last year – yet still only slugged .373 (188th).
That’s wet-noodle territory. That’s not a far cry from the guy whose 27.9% hard-hit rate in 2023 ranked in the bottom 5%, per Statcast and who still ranked in just the 18th percentile in barrel rate and 22nd in average exit velocity in his best season in 2025.
I’d have more optimism for Meyers if he weren’t already turning 30 during the 2026 season. That calf issue and the subsequent loss in range is concerning, too, in the context that we saw almost exactly the same thing happen to Friedl with his own soft-tissue (hamstring) problems just a year ago – also when he was creeping up on age 30. There’s plenty of reasoning as to why having Meyers on the Reds roster in 2026 would make them a better overall club, but it’s the opportunity cost that’s giving me troubles here – he’s not the kind of player you acquire for this price in this way that simply adds last-man-on-roster depth. Rather, this would be – in the same vein as the Gavin Lux acquisition last year – a move that prevents a further, better move from actually going down, and that concerns me to no end.
As a free agent for $3.5 million to be the 4th outfielder on a club willing to spend $140-150 million? Sure, give me Jake Meyers all day long. But if you’ve got to outbid other clubs to acquire him via trade, plan on slotting him as the regular CF, and will only backfill LF with in-house options instead of bringing in a LF bat? Count me out.