The Cincinnati Reds were able to take advantage of a rare opportunity on Friday night. The big news in the baseball world is that Japanese superstar Roki Sasaki has chosen to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers. For stupid reasons, Sasaki is considered an “amateur baseball player” despite being the best pitcher in Japan’s highest league for several years now. That means he’s limited to signing a minor league contract and all of the rules that come along with that. The Dodgers have apparently promised him a larger signing bonus that they currently can give him and needed to acquire via trade more bonus pool allotment. In stepped the Reds to offer them a decent chunk of money to add to the pool in exchange for outfielder Arnaldo Lantigua.
Mark Sheldon of Reds.com reported the club sent the Dodgers $1,500,000 in bonus pool space. Cincinnati, who signed 18 players this week when the 2025 international signing period began, was tied for the largest bonus pool allotment in baseball. They spent a good chunk of that on those 18 players – all of whom you can read about right here – but they still had some money left over. While many players sign in the first week, some players will sign later on in the signing period for various reasons and teams hold onto some additional money for situations like that. Two years ago the Reds did that and signed Sheng-En Lin out of Taiwan in the middle of the summer for 7-figures.
Cincinnati didn’t actually send any money to the Dodgers. They just sent them the bonus pool allotment that will allow Los Angeles to spend that amount of money, and takes away that amount from the Reds in their spending allotment. With the trade the Reds don’t have much left in their pool to spend between now and December 15th when the signing period comes to an end, but there should be some room for a few more signings. As a note on that – signings of $10,000 and lower do not count towards the bonus pool.
Enough of all of that, though. Let’s talk about outfielder Arnaldo Lantigua. The outfielder is currently listed at 6′ 2″ and 200 lbs. He just turned 19 on December 19th. He’s a right-handed hitter and he throws from the right side. While he has played all three outfield spots in his two seasons, almost all of that has come in center.
The Dodgers signed Lantigua for $700,000 in January of 2023. His first season in the Dominican Summer League was cut in half by an injury that cost him a month of the season and limited him to just 29 games with the Dodgers Mega (that’s one of their DSL team names). He hit .222/.345/.475 with 18 walks and 26 strikeouts that season in 119 plate appearances. The average wasn’t good, but he got on base often and he showed off a lot of power.
In 2024 he returned to the Dominican Summer League as an 18-year-old and he was one of the best hitters in the entire league. Playing often and remaining healthy, Arnaldo Lantigua hit .301/.430/.575 with seven doubles, a triple, and 11 home runs – which were the second most in the 51-team league. The teenager walked 33 times and had 34 strikeouts in 193 plate appearances during his 49 games played. You can check out his career stats here.
At 6’2″ and 200 lbs, you would expect him to be able to hit the ball hard. And he does. His 90th percentile exit velocity was just over 104 MPH this past season as an 18-year-old. That’s much higher than the average player in the Dominican Summer League, even when adjusting for players his age.
Scouts tend to believe that power is the calling card with Lantigua, projecting plus power if everything develops right for him. There is less certainty around how much average he will be able to hit for in the long run, though the expectation is that if things go right he’s an average hitter and more likely a below-average one (when it comes to his batting average).
Defensively he probably doesn’t have the speed to play center in the big leagues, but he has a strong arm that should play in right field just fine if and when he does need to make a move out of the middle of the field.
This move is one that should be applauded by the Reds. While the circumstances that led to it can be argued a million ways to Sunday about fairness, competitiveness, whatever – Cincinnati’s front office traded nothing for a guy who got a high-middle tiered signing bonus two years ago on the international market who crushed the ball in his second season.
While Cincinnati could have potentially used the $1,500,000 in pool space to sign a valuable player or a few of them, those guys don’t appear to be available at this juncture. So instead the team just isn’t spending that money (insert your jokes here if you want about the team being cheap and saving money – but I don’t think that’s what this was done for in any way, shape, or form) but used it in a roundabout way to acquire a quality prospect who is well ahead of schedule of anyone that they would have otherwise signed with that money. And given that Lantigua has already shown strong performance – even if it’s just in the Dominican Summer League – it’s a much safer bet, too.