The World Series is underway and by the end of the week there will be a team holding a trophy on the field and celebrating a championship. Whenever that is, free agency will begin the next day. Sort of. That day begins an exclusive five-day negotiating window between free agents and their teams during the 2025 season. Once those five days are up and players and teams have not agreed to a new contract, they can become true free agents and negotiate with all teams unless they receive a qualifying offer during that time. I can’t remember the last time a player agreed to a new deal before testing the true free agent waters within that five-day “exclusive negotiating period.”
This offseason, the Cincinnati Reds have several players set to become free agents sometime in the next two weeks. We’ve already looked at Miguel Andujar, Emilio Pagan and Zack Littell in this series and today we’re going to look at pitcher Nick Martinez.
Cincinnati was in a similar situation with Nick Martinez a year ago as it is this year. Martinez was brought in on a free agent deal in early 2024 after two solid years in San Diego, where he largely pitched out of the bullpen but stepped into the rotation when necessary. His 2024 with the Reds was the best year of his career. He had a career-best ERA of 3.10 and a then-career-high of 142.1 innings pitched. Cincinnati decided to extend a qualifying offer to Martinez and Martinez decided to accept it, returning for 2025.
The now 35-year-old made a career-high 26 starts in 2025, but also appeared in 14 games out of the bullpen. His ERA rose to 4.45 during the season, giving him an ERA+ of 103 (ERA+ is a player’s ERA after applying the park factors for all parks he pitched in during the season, meaning Martinez subsequently had an ERA that would have been 3% better than average). All that came in 165.2 innings, in which Martinez gave up 158 hits, 22 home runs, walked 42 and struck out 116.
In almost every way outside of innings pitched, the 2025 season was a step backwards for Martinez. The right-handed pitcher allowed hits at a higher rate, home runs at a higher rate, his walk rate more than doubled (worth noting that it was still a very, very slow walk rate), and his strikeout rate dropped quite a bit from its already slow rate by today’s standards. Among the 127 pitchers who threw 100 or more innings in the MLB in 2025, Nick Martinez’s strikeout rate (17.0%) was the 108th highest in baseball. His groundball percentage (38.1%) was also closer to the bottom than the top of the list, ranking 89th among that same group of 127 pitchers.
The stuff for Martinez doesn’t stand out. Neither will his results in 2025. And he will be 35 years old for much of the 2026 season. But there are some areas where he has found success in the past — even in 2025, when he had a down year compared to the previous three since returning from Japan, where he pitched from 2018-2021.
Nick Martinez is about as reliable as they come. He missed time in 2019 and 2020 due to a forearm strain, but since returning from that injury during the 2020 season he has stayed incredibly healthy and has either pitched a lot of innings as a starter or pitched out of the bullpen in many games. He has been there for several organizations over the past five years when he was called upon. With his usage history, Martinez can help as a starting pitcher, a short-inning reliever, or as a hybrid-type long reliever.
You can view Nick Martinez’s career stats here.
The qualifying offer
This year, the Major League Baseball qualifying offer is $22,025,000 for a one-year contract.
Cincinnati made the qualifying offer to Nick Martinez a year ago at a slightly lower price. That makes him ineligible for it in his career.
Should the Reds bring him back?
After the season he just had, there is no chance that Nick Martinez will make as much progress as he did in 2025. But what could happen is that it will be several years before he comes back with more total money than what he made last season.
For the Cincinnati Reds, there are two questions that need to be answered: where will Martinez fit in/what role will he fill, and does the amount of money make sense for that role?
Not everyone was healthy during the Reds’ 2025 season, and Nick Martinez was still pushed out of the rotation. With the team seeing Hunter Greene, Andrew Abbott, Nick Lodolo, Brady Singer, Rhett Lowder and Chase Burns as starting pitchers heading into the season, it’s hard to think Martinez has a role as a starter.
It’s almost never the case that a team only needs five starting pitchers during the season. Teams typically use double-digit starters throughout the season, so the fact that the Reds have six guys for five spots isn’t exactly a situation where they don’t “need” more pitchers for depth, but a guy like Martinez is going to be expensive if you simply add your “7th” guy to the starting rotation depth.
But adding Martinez as a reliever who could potentially step into the rotation isn’t the worst idea. That might not be the best thing for Martinez. If a team is willing to give him a chance to start, it also means they’re probably going to offer him a little more money than a team that thinks he’s a quality middle reliever with a ‘we can use him as our 5th starter if we have to’ attitude.
This seems like a situation where the Reds could probably use Martinez moving forward, but also a situation where Martinez could probably get more money elsewhere. Maybe that situation doesn’t develop and he would be more willing to come back in a potentially hybrid type of role. However, that scenario won’t happen in November or December. If it were to happen that way, it would likely be a situation that happens much closer to spring training.
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