On Monday the Cincinnati Reds had their first full-squad practice. Saturday they will get on the field for the first game of spring training in Goodyear, Arizona as they take on their shared-complex mates the Cleveland Guardians.
Unlike the infield where the starters are all pretty much figured out, as well as the backups, the outfield isn’t quite as set. TJ Friedl is going to be in center and Noelvi Marte will be in right. But left field is a little less certain. And the bench outfielders are also slightly less certain, too.
Spencer Steer is probably the guy who will get more time in left than others if everyone remains healthy. After a shoulder injury limited him to first base for much of the 2025 season, with the arrival of both Eugenio Suarez and Sal Stewart, president of baseball operations Nick Krall has noted this offseason leading into the spring that Steer was likely to play multiple positions this upcoming season. Before the shoulder issue he had been playing often in left field in both 2023 and 2024.
But with Steer probably spending some other time at other positions throughout the year, there’s going to be opportunities for other guys. And there are a lot of them. Will Benson, Tyler Callihan, Blake Dunn, and Rece Hinds are all returning to compete for a job. But they aren’t the only ones as the Reds spent time this offseason bringing in JJ Bleday and Dane Myers to try and strengthen the outfield. And then there’s Hector Rodriguez who was added to the 40-man roster in the offseason and has yet to make his big league debut.
Among the group outside of Friedl, Marte, and Steer, the things that could come into play beyond the on-the-field stuff is the ugly thing we call options.For Cincinnati, the good news is that they all have options. Rodriguez has three of them and Callihan has two of them. The remaining group competing for a spot all have one.
The infield is quite right-handed when it comes to the hitting aspect of things. And both Spencer Steer and Noelvi Marte are right-handed hitters who look to be getting plenty of time, being a left-handed hitter could be a factor the club may consider just to balance the bench/starter situation when it comes to match ups. That could be in favor with guys like Bleday, Callihan and Benson, and to a lesser extent Rodriguez given his age and experience. Rodriguez won’t be 22-years-old for another few weeks, so the odds that he makes the team as a bench player are incredibly slim no matter how well he performs this spring.
JJ Bleday is coming off of a season in which he struggled, hitting just .212/.294/.404. He also had his worst rated defensive season of his career, too. With that said, though, he’s never been considered much of a good fielder. He’s played in parts of four big league seasons and he’s hit .167, .195, .243, and .212 in those seasons. I know that it’s 2026 and batting average isn’t anywhere near the best stat we have to tell us how good someone is at hitting, but when you’ve hit under .200 twice and under .215 another time in three of your four seasons it’s pretty telling about what kind of hitter you are.
What Bleday does bring to the table is good power. He’s only played a full season once in his four years and that came in 2024 when he hit 20 home runs. Last season he hit 14 of them in 98 games. His power isn’t elite or anything like that, but he’s got a good amount of pop in his bat.
Tyler Callihan has only played in a handful of games in the big leagues. He’s also only played in 28 games in Triple-A in his career, too. Injuries have kept him off of the field a lot in his career. Since being drafted in 2019 he’s missed significant time in 2021, 2022, 2024, and 2025. And then he didn’t play at all in 2020 because the minor league season was cancelled. After needing surgery to put his arm back together after a gruesome injury when he ran into the wall in May last year he didn’t get back on the field.
Callihan has some position flexibility that the rest of the group really doesn’t. He can play some spots on the infield as well as the corner outfield. That could work in his favor. The left-handed hitter also has some speed that could be useful on the bases, though he’s more of a guy with good speed but isn’t someone who is truly fast. He’s never shown a lot of power – he’s hit 37 home runs in 400 professional games, but he’s not a slap hitter.
Will Benson has a similar hitting profile to that of JJ Bleday. He’s also played in parts of four seasons in the big leagues and he’s hit .182, .275, .187, and .226 in those four years. One good year in there and three poor ones. Also like Bleday he’s got some pop in his bat. He’s essentially unplayable against left-handed pitching where he has a .495 OPS in his career.
Unlike Bleday, though, Benson is a solid defender. He’s stretched in center but can cover you there in a pinch. In both left and right field he’s been solid to good throughout his career. Benson has good speed and that could also allow him to be a pinch running at option.
Hector Rodriguez probably doesn’t have much of a chance to make the team. He probably has a better chance to make the team as a starter than he does as a bench player, but neither seems likely without multiple injuries. The 21-year-old has starter potential but out of spring training it’s not likely to happen. With that said, he projects to hit for average and some power while making a lot of contact. He could probably use some more time in Triple-A to get some more experience and work on some smaller things to round out his game.
The right-handed hitting group of Blake Dunn, Rece Hinds, and Dane Myers all have some things in common. But they all have things that make them quite a bit different from the others, too.
Rece Hinds has power that the other two, and most guys in professional baseball can only dream of. Eugenio Suarez and Elly De La Cruz are the only other Reds players who could make the argument to have the kind of pop in their bats to match up with Hinds when it comes to the raw power side of things. But Hinds has struggled to do much hitting at the big league level in his limited opportunities over the last two years outside of an incredibly hot one week in his debut back in 2024 where he hit .500 with five home runs and 11 RBI in his first six games. He went 1-24 with Cincinnati the rest of the season and then just 5-43 in 2025 in the big leagues.
His time in Triple-A went much better in 2025 as he dramatically cut down his strikeout rate, lowering it from 38% in 2024 at the level to 26% in 2025 while hitting .302/.359/.563 with 24 home runs in 107 games for Louisville. Being able to cut down on the strikeouts in the big leagues is the next step he’s going to have to make and show that he can be somewhat useful as a hitter against MLB level pitching. Defensively Hinds can play good defense in the corners and he’s gotten some experience in center while in the minor leagues. Despite his size and physique, Hinds has plus speed that he can be used off the bench as a pinch runner.
Blake Dunn is one of the fastest guys in the organization. He has elite-level speed. With that he’s able to provide baserunning ability that no one else here can. It also allows him to handle center on the defensive size of things, but he’s also capable of playing the two corner spots.
Much like Hinds, Dunn has not found much success in the big leagues in his limited time. He got 75 plate appearances in 2025 with the Reds and hit just .150/.320/.233 after hitting .154/.241/.308 in 29 plate appearances in 2024 with the team. When he went back to the minors he struggled for a bit but turned things around with Louisville and hit .291/.397/.401.
Dane Myers is going to turn 30 in March, so he’s older than the other two right-handed hitters in this group by quite a bit. And 2025 was the first year in which he had more than 100 at-bats in the big leagues. He got 307 at-bats in 2025 with the Marlins and hit just .235/.291/.326. He’s a career .245/.299/.354 hitter. Expecting much out of his bat seems like a poor bet give his track record of not being able to break into the Miami lineup until he was 29 and then not hitting much at all when he did.
Some places will cite things like his .297/.360/.456 line against left-handed pitching on his resume as a good thing. And while it’s certainly not a bad line at all, it’s also made up of 182 at-bats spread out of his entire 20’s. It’s a small sample size spread out over multiple years and isn’t all that useful as a data point in my opinion. Myers has a lot of questions about his bat, but the rest of his game is solid. He’s got above-average speed but isn’t a true burner. Defensively he can cover you at all three spots in the outfield and he’s got a strong arm.
While some of these guys may have slightly better resumes than the others, no one really stands out all that much in terms of “lock them in”. Rodriguez is far and away the longest shot but that’s more because of his inexperience and age rather than his current skillset. What the Reds do to try and fill out the bench from this group will be interesting and may give a little bit of insight into how they plan to use the bench during the season as some of these guys have very different skillsets that they bring to the table.
