With the 2025 season officially complete for the Cincinnati Reds it’s time for fans, media, and even the team to look back and determine where the team was successful, where they struggled, and what they would like to see happen moving forward in order to improve. Two of those groups don’t really make much of a difference, though. But the front office? Their decisions matter. And one of those decisions is going to be whether or not they are going to pick up the options on several players for 2026 or decline them and allow those players to become free agents. We already broke down the decision around outfielder Austin Hays. Now we’re going to look at reliever Brent Suter.
Unlike the Hays option, Suter’s option is a team option and not a mutual option. The option on the left-handed pitcher is for $3,000,000. If they decline the option then they owe Suter $250,000. That essentially makes the question they are being asked is do they believe he is worth $2,750,000 for the 2026 season.
Let’s start by looking back at 2025. The now 36-year-old pitched in 48 games for the Reds and he had a 4.52 ERA. He threw 67.2 innings as he was often used for multiple innings. During that time he gave up 69 hits, allowed 11 home runs, walked 18 batters, and he had 53 strikeouts.
Overall, those numbers are nothing to write home about. But there are some things worth looking deeper at. When July ended, Brent Suter had an ERA of 3.02 and had allowed just 41 hits with six of those being home runs. But over the final two months he got lit up like a tree installed at Rockefeller Center in December. Over the final two months he posted an ERA of 9.00 in 17.0 innings, allowed five home runs as a part of his 28 hits allowed. Things were so tough that despite being in a playoff race he was used three times in September while being active the entire month and didn’t pitch once in the teams final 11 games.
As a left-handed reliever one thing most teams look at is how they perform against left-handed hitters. Suter was good against them, holding them to a .243/.282/.387 line on the year (.266/.324/.449 against righties). Cincinnati didn’t use him as a lefty specialist, though. That’s tougher to do in today’s game where pitchers have to face three batters or finish an inning before being replaced on the mound, but Suter was often used for multiple innings.
Suter has never been a hard thrower. But the 2025 season saw him throw harder than ever before in his career with regards to his fastball – 88.9 MPH – and saw his cutter thrown faster than it had been since 2021. And it wasn’t a situation where he was throwing harder when he was having success and it tailed off when he began to struggle – he actually threw harder from July through the end of the season than he had earlier in the year.
Do the Reds have an understanding of why he struggled so much after the trade deadline? Was it that he all of a sudden began throwing harder and he was getting less movement on his slider and cutter (the difference was small but it’s noticeable if you look at the data)? And if so, do they think it’s something that they can fix? Brent Suter through July is surely a guy you’d like to see back at a price of $3,000,000. But what happened down the stretch changes the math on that a lot.
Relief pitchers that aren’t closers or elite set up men just don’t garner the same kind of contracts that they used to. But Suter’s option isn’t a high priced one, either. He will cost about four times the league minimum if the Reds bring him back for the 2026 season. The problem is that you may not be comfortable in knowing what you are going to be getting given the extreme fall off in the final two months.
Picking up the option isn’t that big of a risk because the money involved is small. But the Cincinnati Reds front office is also working with a very limited budget – or at least has in the past and we don’t really know what their 2026 budget is at this point. Every little bit matters, even if that little bit is just an extra $2,000,000 (his salary minus the buyout, minus the league minimum to replace him on the roster).
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