We’re still a bit away from the start of free agency, which doesn’t begin until a day after the end of the World Series. But even then, it’s not really a free agency season, as teams will have five days from that point to have exclusive negotiations with players who are now free agents and who were also on their team last season. Once that time is up, if players 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.”
The Cincinnati Reds have a number of players set to become free agents in the next two weeks. We started this series earlier this week when we looked at Miguel Andujar and whether the team should try to bring him back. Today we’re going to take a similar approach and see how the team should handle things with Emilio Pagan.
Just over two years ago, the Cincinnati Reds signed Pagan to a two-year deal for $16,000,000, where he would earn half of that in 2024 and the other half in 2025. He was coming off a season with Minnesota in 2023 where he had a 2.99 ERA in 69.1 innings for the Twins.
Emilio Pagan’s two years in Cincinnati were very similar to his last two years in Minnesota. In his penultimate season with the Twins, he posted an ERA of 4.43. In 2024, he posted a 4.50 ERA with the Reds. That last year at Minnesota he had an ERA of 2.99 and this past season in Cincinnati he had an ERA of 2.88.
The 2024 season was a bit disappointing for Pagan. He missed some time while on the injured list, throwing just 38.0 innings and appearing in just 38 games, after averaging more than 60 appearances per season in the three previous years. He allowed more hits than he threw and gave up more home runs than in 2023, despite throwing 31.1 fewer innings.
However, in 2025, things took a major turn. Pagan saw his ERA drop to 2.88 – the second best of his career (2019) – in his 70 games and 68.2 innings. He would give up one more hit than he would in 2024, but threw 30.2 more innings. Pagan did that while maintaining a good walking pace and a strong strikeout percentage, issuing 22 free passes and striking out 81 batters. All of that also came while he was picking up a career-high 32 saves for the Reds during the year.
You can view the career statistics forR Emilio Pagan here.
The qualifying offer
This year, the Major League Baseball qualifying offer is $22,025,000 for a one-year contract.
Cincinnati made a qualifying offer to Nick Martinez last year and he accepted (at a slightly lower price). That made him the only player to accept a qualifying offer around Major League Baseball last year.
So the question is: should the Reds make another qualifying offer this season and should it be for Emilio Pagan? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that no closer makes that much money per season, and while Pagan was pretty good in 2025, he doesn’t have a long, proven track record as the kind of reliever a team should hand such a deal to — even if it’s just for one season. Relievers simply don’t throw enough innings for that sort of thing in almost every case, but especially if the team in question isn’t spending much money overall.
Should the Reds bring him back?
This is a very different question than the above. Cincinnati shouldn’t give Emilio Pagan $22,025,000 for one season. But that doesn’t mean they should write him off as a player they want to sign.
When the 2026 season begins, Pagan will be 34 years old. However, he will turn 35 in early May, so next year he will be in his ‘age 35’ season. At his age, he will be looking at what is likely his last multi-year deal. And now that he’s coming off a season where he proved he could close, he’ll likely get a little more money than he otherwise would have, even if his “stuff” doesn’t profile as an elite-level closer.
It seems likely that he will get a raise from the $8,000,000 per year he made with the Reds over the past two seasons. The question is how much? Given the inconsistency of his career, his age and the lack of what is considered closer stuff, it probably won’t be much more than that and the deal probably won’t last more than a few years.
The Reds don’t exactly have many reliable options for the bullpen in 2026. Tony Santillan returns and he has pitched 159 games for Cincinnati since 2021 and has a career 3.02 ERA. After that, there isn’t much reliability in the bullpen. That’s not to say there isn’t potential there — Graham Ashcraft has had some success in the past, Connor Phillips had some success in 2025, the team has more starters than spots in the rotation if everyone is healthy and they could get creative there if they wanted to — but the team could certainly use a reliable reliever pickup for 2026 given how things look right now.
However, it’s probably a fair question whether Emilio Pagan is actually a “reliable reliever.” In two of the last three years, his ERA has been just under 3.00. But in two of the past four years it has been over 4.40. In three of the last five it was more than 4.40. In four of the last six it was more than 4.40.
The 2025 season is more important than the 2024 season, more important than the 2023 season, more important than the 2022 season. And so on. More recent data is more valuable than older data. But there’s something interesting when you look at something very specific regarding Emilio Pagan: his fastball speed.
In his career, he has had an ERA under 3.00 three times in his nine seasons. In those three seasons, his fastball averaged 95+ MPH. In five of the other six seasons, his fastball velocity was under 95.0 MPH. It wasn’t until 2022 that his ERA was above 3.00 and his fastball velocity was above 95.0.
In three of the last four years he has been over 95 MPH and in the one season he wasn’t, he missed a lot of time with an injury and rebounded the next year. So maybe there’s a little more reason to think he could be a “reliable reliever” in the short term just looking at this.
However, that’s not the only thing we need to look at. Delving into other things, we can see that Pagan has been very good in his career, while his BABIP has been very low. Over his career he has a BABIP well below league average, so there is probably something he is doing that he can repeat over a longer period of time to reduce the number of hits on balls in play against him. But in years where things haven’t quite gone that way and his BABIP is close to league average or higher, he’s struggled and even in some years where his BABIP has been much better than league average, he’s still not exactly good at keeping runs off the board.
One reason for that is that he has given up home runs at a rapid rate during his career. He is an extreme flyball thrower. Flyballs don’t get hit as often as grounders. But when fly balls turn into hits, they are much more for extra bases. And as we know, grounders never turn into home runs, while flyballs have turned into home runs 13% of the time in Pagan’s career.
That said, his home run rate per flyball from 2017 to 2022 was much higher than it has been since the start of 2023. Since 2023, his rate is just 9%, while the league average is 12%. However, Pagan is giving up far more flyouts than the league, and as such his home runs allowed per 9 innings pitched are slightly closer to league average in this day and age.
There is a lot going on with Emilio Pagan and whether he can remain effective. Can he keep his BABIP low as he has done throughout his career? Will his home run percentage look more like where he was the last three years rather than where he was earlier in his career? At 35, can he keep his stuff for the years it will likely take to re-sign him? Does the commitment make sense in terms of dollars and years for the Reds?
The benefit of bringing back Emilio Pagan is that he can do all of these things and you get a repeat of what you got in 2025, or close to it. That’s quite valuable to have. But is that a realistic expectation? That’s a lot harder to say, as he’s had some inconsistencies throughout his career when it comes to his ability to prevent runs. And that’s where the downside comes in: he just hasn’t been able to consistently prevent runs from season to season. Many care providers cannot do that. That’s why elite closers get paid a lot of money and almost every other reliever doesn’t. The guys who show they can do it every year are the guys that teams have confidence in and are willing to write big checks for several years to come. There just aren’t that many guys who fit that profile.
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