SAN DIEGO -- Even before he officially asked the Pittsburgh Pirates for a trade at the end of last week, Bryan Reynolds seemed to be on the Red Sox' radar.
The Red Sox are in need of a corner outfielder to join Alex Verdugo and Kiké Hernandez and the fact that Reynolds is under control for three more seasons would give the Red Sox a 27-year-old switch-hitter just entering the prime of his career.
The Sox reportedly had an interest in Reynolds at the trade deadline last August, but the Pirates, unsurprisingly, established a sky-high asking price. Now that Reynolds has rejected a contract extension offer from the Pirates and asked out, the Sox' interest is bound to intensify.
But such a trade would be enormously costly in terms of what the Sox would have to give up from their pool of prospects and hardly their best use of those resources.
True, Reynolds would be a relatively affordable piece in terms of salary. He's due $6.75 million in 2023 and will then be eligible for salary arbitration in 2024 and 2025. Over the next three years, Reynolds will likely earn about $30 million -- reasonable enough.
But what would the Red Sox be getting in Reynolds?
For one thing, defensive metrics have him as a below-average defender. He's proven that he can't play center field, with -14 defensive runs saved there in 2022 and -5 the year before. The Sox wouldn't necessarily need him to play center, with Hernandez set to handle the position. But if the Sox ask Reynolds to play right field at Fenway, it's tough to envision him handling the challenge of that assignment. If you can't play center field, it's doubtful he could successfully acclimate to right in Boston.
Offensively, Reynolds is more impressive, with a career .847 OPS. But even that profile is wildly inconsistent.
He had what looked to be a breakout season in 2021, being selected to the NL All-Star team, earning NL MVP votes and finishing with a .912 OPS. But he followed that with a season that saw him regress in nearly every offensive category. His batting average dropped by 40 points, his OBP slipped some 45 points and his strikeout rate soared.
The dropoff is part of a career trend for Reynolds, who's been unable to string together solid seasons in his four years with the Pirates. After a strong 2019 campaign (.880 OPS0, he had a disastrous 2020 season, with a .632 OPS.
Does any of that sound like an elite player?
True, Reynolds is better than any of the Red Sox outfield options currently on the roster. If the season were to begin tomorrow, the Sox would likely be looking at a platoon of Rob Refsnyder and.....somebody else in right field.
But it's important to note that, with widespread interest in a controllable 27-year-old, Pirates GM Ben Cherington can demand a huge haul of prospects in return. There are perhaps as many as 10 teams who had varying degrees of interest in Reynolds -- the Yankees among them. The Pirates released a statement over the weekend that essentially said they had no intention of dealing Reynolds in the wake of his request, but then, they had to say that. It would make little sense for Cherington to hold onto Reynolds.
It would be one thing for the Red Sox to put together a package of three top prospects for, say, Oakland A's catcher Sean Murphy, to whom the Sox have also been linked. Murphy plays a premium defensive position at a spot where the Red Sox have few other top options. The current tandem of Reese McGuire and Connor Wong may be serviceable but would hardly qualify as stellar.
Further, the Red Sox don't have an obvious projected catching regular in their system. The highest-ranked catcher in the minors is Nathan Hickey, a fifth-round choice in the draft 2021. But even Hickey is somewhat limited as a bat-first catcher with suspect receiving skills.
In other words: the catching cupboard is nearly bare. A chance to get Murphy, just 28, with four years of control remaining, makes far more sense. (That said, if the A's are insistent upon Brayan Bello as part of any return package, that's a non-starter for the Sox).
The Red Sox have reached a point where their inventory of prospects has deepened and they can afford to bundle some of them for some major league help. Every contending team follows that path at some point.
And there are some players for whom surrendering multiple prospects makes sense. It's just that Bryan Reynolds isn't one of them.