Matt Eddy at Baseball America has up the full list of minor league free agents now live over at Baseball America for every team in baseball. The list features all 534 free agents and that includes 20 Cincinnati Reds players that opted to test the open market.
Among the 20 players are the 2008 international bonus babies Yorman Rodriguez and Juan Duran, both of whom were outrighted to the minor leagues in 2016. Outfielders Kyle Waldrop and Donald Lutz also join them in free agency.
Kevin Shackelford, who posted a 2.03 ERA between Pensacola and Louisville in 2016 also elected the free agency route.
Looking back to 2008 the Cincinnati Reds burst onto the international scene by signing Juan Duran, who no one else seemed to know was eligible to sign at the time to a deal worth $2M. Later in the year the team signed one of the top free agent prospects on the market, Yorman Rodriguez, to a deal worth $2.5M. Duran never reached the big leagues, topping out in Double-A. The power was always there, but he could never make enough contact to hit for any sort of average or get on base enough to counter balance things at the plate.
Rodriguez is a much different story. While he never excelled in a given season, outside of his time in Billings at age 16, he performed better than the league average every step of the way in his career. He reached the big leagues for a brief time in 2014, and while he didn’t get into a game in 2015 he also was on the big league roster for a short period of time. He was out of options this year at age 23, but a set of injuries kept him out for the entire year. When he was outrighted to Triple-A, perhaps the writing was on the wall that the organization was going to move on – though I’m still shocked to see that the team chose to keep around several other players instead of him.
That 2008 season was the last time, prior to this year, that the team spent big time in international free agency for true amateur players (Aroldis Chapman and Raisel Iglesias were both quite a bit older and were given big league contracts).
The organization will be looking at a very different Triple-A squad next year, losing out on several guys that helped lead the offense in 2016 with veteran minor leaguers Hernan Iribarren and Jermaine Curtis electing to become free agents as well.
The team may try to re-sign some of these players, but their exclusive negotiation period is over and these guys will be able to see what else is out there for them.