LAS VEGAS – The Cincinnati Reds, as expected, declined Mike Minor’s mutual option for the 2023 season and paid a $500,000 buyout to send Minor into free agency.
It was a disastrous 2022 season for the 34-year-old Minor, who told The Enquirer he was mulling retirement after dealing with pain in his shoulder all year. Acquired from the Kansas City Royals in a trade for Amir Garrett, Minor had the worst season of his career with a 4-12 record and a 6.06 ERA in 19 starts.
“It’s mostly if I get the itch to play, then maybe,” Minor said at the end of the season when asked if he’d pitch in 2023. “But it also goes along the same lines of if I feel good. If I don’t feel good, then that answers that question pretty easily. I’d have to feel good and I’d have to want to play and want to be away from my family again. I’m not closing the door, but it’s barely cracked.”
The Reds traded for Minor during spring training and paid his $10 million salary because they wanted an innings-eater in their rotation. Minor, however, missed the first two months of the season with a shoulder strain, and the Reds’ lack of depth in the rotation was a part of their 3-22 start to the season.
Once Minor joined the rotation, he was ineffective. The Reds lost 12 of his first 13 starts. He finished fifth on the team in innings pitched behind Hunter Greene, Graham Ashcraft, Tyler Mahle and Nick Lodolo.
“I feel like I can pitch, I just have a limiting factor of the shoulder kind of limiting my delivery and the way I can execute pitches and the velocity,” Minor said in September. “Swings and misses are going to be a lot less with less velocity and the stuff is going to be a lot worse. This year, it’s been all year. But there have been good and bad games where I felt better on some, worse on others. I wanted to at least give it a try. I feel like they pay me to play. I played as long as I could.”
Along with declining Minor’s mutual option, which had $500,000 paid by the Royals as a part of their March trade, the Reds reinstated 10 players from the 60-day injured list: pitchers Tejay Antone, Vladimir Gutierrez, Jeff Hoffman, Tony Santillan, Lucas Sims and Art Warren, catcher Tyler Stephenson, first basemen Joey Votto and Mike Moustakas, and outfielder Nick Senzel.
The Reds’ 40-man roster currently sits at 39 players.
Assistant pitching coach Eric Jagers leaves Reds for Mets
The Reds dismissed five coaches at the end of their 100-loss season, and had a sixth coach leave Tuesday.
Eric Jagers, the club’s assistant pitching coach for the last two seasons, was hired by the New York Mets as their director of pitching development. Jagers, 27, was one of the youngest coaches on a big-league staff and was initially hired by the Reds before the 2020 season as their minor league assistant pitching coordinator under Kyle Boddy.
Jagers, who was known for his work in pitch design at the Driveline training facility near Seattle, was promoted to the Reds’ big-league staff ahead of the 2021 season after Caleb Cotham was hired as the Philadelphia Phillies’ pitching coach.
The coaches who were fired or did not have their contracts renewed at the end of the season included hitting coach Alan Zinter, first-base/infield coach Delino DeShields, bullpen coach Lee Tunnell, assistant coach Rolando Valles and advance scouting coach Cristian Pérez.
Derek Johnson, who oversees the minor leagues as the director of pitching, is currently the lone pitching coach on the Reds’ Major League coaching staff.
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