Retaining Free Agents: Cincinnati Reds pitcher Nick Martinez

The World Series in underway and by the end of the week there is going to be a team holding a trophy on the field and celebrating a championship. Whenever that is then the following day free agency will begin. Sort of. That day begins a 5-day exclusive negotiating window between free agents and their team during the 2025 season. When those five days are up if players and teams have not agreed to a new contract then they can become true free agents and negotiate with all teams unless they are extended a qualifying offer during that. I don’t remember the last time a player agreed to a new deal before testing the true free agent waters within that 5-day “exclusive negotiating” period of time.

This offseason the Cincinnati Reds have multiple players who are set to become free agents at some point in the next two weeks. We’ve already taken a look at Miguel Andujar, Emilio Pagan, and Zack Littell in this series and today we’re going to look at pitcher Nick Martinez.

Cincinnati found themselves in a similar situation a year ago with Nick Martinez as they find themselves this year. Martinez was brought in at the start of 2024 on a free agent deal after two solid years with San Diego where he pitched mostly out of the bullpen but did step into the rotation when needed. His 2024 with the Reds was the best year of his career. He had a career best 3.10 ERA and a then career high 142.1 innings pitched. Cincinnati decided to extend Martinez a qualifying offer and Martinez decided to accept it and he returned for 2025.

The now 35-year-old made a career high 26 starts in 2025, but he also pitched in 14 games out of the bullpen. His ERA jumped up to 4.45 on the season, which game him an ERA+ of 103 (ERA+ is a players ERA after applying the park factors for all of the parks he pitched in during the season, meaning that after that Martinez had an ERA that would have been 3% better than average). All of that came in 165.2 innings that saw Martinez give up 158 hits, 22 home runs, walk 42 batters, and strike out 116 batters.

In just about 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 low walk rate), and his strikeout rate dropped off quite a bit from an already low rate by today’s standard. Among the 127 pitchers who threw 100 or more inning in MLB in 2025, the strikeout rate for Nick Martinez (17.0%) was 108th best in baseball. His groundball rate (38.1%) was also closer to the bottom than it was the top of the list, coming in at 89th on the list among that same group of 127 pitchers.

The stuff for Martinez does not stick out. His results in 2025 didn’t, either. And he’s going to be 35-years-old for much of the 2026 season. But there are some areas where he’s 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 it comes. He missed time in 2019 and 2020 with a forearm strain, but since returning from that injury during the 2020 season he’s remained incredibly healthy and has either pitched plenty of innings as a starter or pitched in a lot of games out of the bullpen. He’s been there when called upon for the last five years across multiple organizations. With his history of usage, Martinez can help out as a starting pitcher, a short-inning reliever, or a hybrid-type of long reliever.

You can see the career stats for Nick Martinez here.

The Qualifying Offer

This year the qualifying offer in Major League Baseball is $22,025,000 for a 1-year contract.

Cincinnati made the qualifying offer to Nick Martinez a year ago at a slightly lower price. That makes him ineligible for it moving forward in his career.

Should the Reds bring him back?

Coming off of the season he just had, there’s no chance that Nick Martinez is going to make as much moving forward as he made in 2025. But what could happen is that it’s going to require multiple years in order to bring him back with more total money than what he earned last season.

For the Cincinnati Reds there’s two questions that need to be answered: Where does 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 season for the Reds in 2025 and Nick Martinez still got pushed out of the rotation. With the team looking at Hunter Greene, Andrew Abbott, Nick Lodolo, Brady Singer, Rhett Lowder, and Chase Burns as starting pitching options as they head into the season it’s tough to think that Martinez has a role as a starter.

It almost never happens that throughout the season a team needs just five starting pitchers. Teams usually use double-digit starters throughout a 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 for simply adding your “7th” guy in the starting rotation depth.

But adding Martinez as a reliever who could potentially step into the rotation is not the worst idea. For Martinez, though, that may not be the best thing. If a team is willing to give him a shot to start it also means they are likely going to offer him a bit more money than a team who thinks he’s a quality middle reliever with a “we can use him as our 5th starter if we have to” kind of guy.

This seems like a situation where the Reds probably could use Martinez moving forward, but also a situation where Martinez would likely get more money going somewhere else. Maybe that situation doesn’t develop and he would be more willing to come back in a potential hybrid kind of role. That scenario isn’t going to be one that happens in November or December, though. If it were to happen that way it’s likely going to be a situation that happens much closer to spring training.