Spring training hasn’t gotten started yet for most minor leaguers, though a few dozen of them are already in Arizona for early minor league camp. But for a few guys, they won’t be getting to Arizona at all this year. Baseball America’s updated transaction log shows that the Cincinnati Reds have released two minor league pitchers.
Left-handed pitchers Eduardo Gonzalez and Ben Walmsley were both released by the organization over the past three weeks. Gonzalez, who signed with the Reds in 2021, only threw 22.2 innings with the Reds. All of those innings came back in 2021 with the Dominican Summer League Reds when he went 3-0 and posted a 1.99 ERA while striking out 28 and walking 16. He missed both the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
The Reds signed Ben Walmsley out of Australia in 2022. He pitched in 11 games that season as a 17-year-old in the Arizona Complex League. In in 20.2 innings he posted a 6.10 ERA with 10 walks and 24 strikeouts. Walmsley did not pitch in 2023 during the regular season, but he did pitch a little bit in the Australian Baseball League this winter. He allowed four runs on four hits and eight walks (and two more batters were hit by pitches) in his 4.0 innings spread out over five games for Brisbane.
Levi Stoudt’s parting words
When the Reds acquired Levi Stoudt in the trade with Seattle that saw the Reds sent Luis Castillo to the American League club and bring back Stoudt along with Noelvi Marte, Edwin Arroyo, and Andrew Moore, he was one of the Mariners top 10 prospects. A year and a half later he’s back with Seattle after the Reds designated him for assignment and the Mariners claimed him on waivers.
Stoudt’s time with Cincinnati didn’t go all that well. He had been struggling a bit in Double-A with Seattle when he was acquired, and he was a little better in his final five starts with the Reds in their farm system in 2022 before the season ended. But in 2023 he never really seemed to get things going in the right direction, even as he made his big league debut early in the season. His ERA was 6.23 in 25 games with Triple-A Louisville and it was 9.58 in four games with the Reds. And between the two stops he handed out 58 free passes via the walk and another seven via a hit batter, while striking out just 67 hitters in 92.2 innings.
On Sunday he spoke with Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times and didn’t have the best things to say about the Cincinnati Reds pitching development.
“It was different,” he told the Seattle Times. “It was a little bit of I’d say lack of direction, in my sense. It was kind of not much of a philosophy. It was kind of just go play baseball and we’ll help you along the way.”
“That’s the most exciting thing for me is to get back to that process of them looking at me and saying, ‘all right, this is what we know and what can we do to make you the best version of yourself.”
Stoudt undoubtedly struggled with the Reds. His control went backwards and his stuff was inconsistent at best. How much of that was on him versus the coaching/plan is something that we’re never going to really know. But from where I stand (or sit, since I’m at a desk typing this), the most important thing here is that Stoudt is suggesting that the organization didn’t really have all that much of an individual plan for pitchers from the outset. That’s not to say that they didn’t help – Stoudt notes that they would “help you along the way”, which seems to suggest that once you were having struggles or if you came to them looking for something that they’d be there for you.
Within the article at the Seattle Times he suggests that the Mariners – at least when he was there from 2019-2022, had presented him with a more concrete plan of what they wanted from him from the get-go. He said he’s excited to get back to that.