If it feels like the Cincinnati Reds are making roster moves daily that’s probably an accurate feelings. Between injuries, illnesses, and lack of performance the club has been shuffling players back and forth between Triple-A and the Reds have been sending a whole lot of transactions through the MLB offices in New York lately. Today marks another day for that as they are calling up outfielder Noelvi Marte from Louisville and optioning TJ Friedl to Triple-A.
It’s been a tough season for Friedl in 2026. He got out to a very slow start to begin the year and in mid-to-late April he seemed to start turning things around, hitting .311 with six doubles and two home runs between the 19th of April and May 3rd. But in 44 plate appearances since then he’s had four hits – all singles – and just three walks. That’s a .291 OPS for the better part of a month. He’s lost playing time during that stretch and just hasn’t been able to get things going in the right direction. Now he’ll get regularly playing time in Triple-A and hopefully get things turned around and be the hitter he’s been in the past.
Noelvi Marte also had a slow start to 2026. He hit just .138/.194/.138 with nearly every ball he made contact on being a grounder for the first two weeks of the season. Cincinnati had seen enough to think that he needed time in the minor leagues to get his swing and swing decisions right and optioned him to Triple-A.
Since arriving in Louisville on April 15th he has done nothing but crush the baseball. Marte has played in 40 games for the Bats since he was sent down and he’s hitting .369/.409/.575 with seven doubles, a triple, and eight home runs. He’s walked 12 times and struck out just 26 times.
With that impressive production, though, has come some concerns. While his groundball rate in MLB to start this season was an absurd 84.2%, even in Triple-A it’s been 49% (league average rate is 42%). For a player with his kind of power you want to see the ball off the ground a bit more.
The bigger question is about his strikezone discipline. In Triple-A he’s expanded the zone on 37% of the pitches he’s seen. While that’s an improvement over the 47% he had with Cincinnati earlier this year, the league average rate is just 30% and that’s facing big league pitchers. He’s also swinging less than ever at pitches in the zone when it comes to his time in Triple-A or the big leagues. He’s only swung at 49% of the pitches in the zone with the Bats.
What he has been quite good at, though, is making contact on pitches in the zone when he does swing. He’s made contact on 92% of the pitches in the zone he’s swung at, but he was also making contact on 91% of the pitches in the zone he swung at with the Reds earlier this year – the results of that have just been very different with Louisville. The league average rate on in-zone contact is 86%, so he’s been above-average there.
Another big difference is that in Triple-A he’s found himself in much better counts. With the Reds he saw a first pitch strike 71% of the time in 2026. The league average this season is just 61%. In Louisville he’s only seen first pitch strikes 51% of the time. Some of that could be his decision making to swing less overall. Some of it could just be random variance in a smaller sample size. But either way, he’s seeing fewer strikes to begin his plate appearances.
Where Noelvi Marte fits into the plans in the outfield isn’t yet known. He’s been playing center with the Bats more than right field. Will he play every day? Or will he be relegated to splitting time in the outfield with a rotation of other players? Either way, if he wants to keep playing he’s going to have to look far more like the hitter he showed he was in Louisville in 2026 than the one he showed in the first two weeks of the season with Cincinnati.
