Cincinnati Reds international signings list

The Cincinnati Reds Media Guide isn’t completely available yet, but portions of it are completed and available to the media. Fortunately, I’m able to have access to that and I’ve gone through the Player Development section to find everyone who signed in 2016 or 2017 from the international ranks.

The two big signings were both from Cuba. The organization paid $7M to sign shortstop Alfredo Rodriguez and another $4.75M to right handed pitcher Vladimir Gutierrez. That doesn’t include any penalties they paid on top of that, which was another $5-6M for just those two players. While some of the players listed below fall into the 2015-2016 international signing period, most are from the most recent 2016-2017 period. Penalties were also paid on their bonuses because of the overage tax on the Reds international bonus pool.

Let’s take a look at how the list breaks down in a few different categories before jumping into the actual players that were signed.

The split between position players and pitchers was strong – 47% pitchers and 53% position players. However, there was a huge difference between right handed and left handed pitchers. There are many more righties than lefties in baseball, but 20-to-2 is a pretty big gap.

A large majority of international players were signed out of the Dominican Republic. The next largest country of origin was Venezuela. That’s not surprising as the Dominican Republic and Venezuela tend to dominate the Latin America signing area. The team also picked up the two previously mentioned Cuban born players as well as one player from Mexico. Two players didn’t have a country of birth listed – which may or may not be corrected by the time that the full Media Guide is available.

Let’s jump into the actual signed players.

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Here’s the list of all players that were signed between January 2016 and two weeks ago. I’ve also included whether or not the player played during the 2016 season or not. Everyone that did play was on one of the two Dominican Summer League teams.

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