The offseason is both upon us and not upon us. Teams can make moves involving players that are still under contract, but no trade or free agent signings can happen yet. Players and teams can’t yet official pick up or decline their options for the following season, either. But teams and players are certainly trying to figure out what they want to do about those options. The Cincinnati Reds have several players with options on their deal for the 2026 season. We’ve already looked at Austin Hays and Brent Suter. Today we’re going to take a look at the option for reliever Scott Barlow.
Let’s start out with the financial side of things. To bring him back the team would have to pay him $6,500,000. If they decline the option then they owe him $1,000,000. So essentially the team has to decide if they think it’s worth paying him $5,500,000 for the 2026 season to pitch for them.
To make that choice, let’s look back at how he performed in 2025 with the Reds. The right-handed reliever posted a 4.21 ERA in his 68.1 innings pitched over 75 appearances. He was successful when it came to limiting hits as he gave up just 50 of them on the season. He also struck out 75 of the 303 batters he faced, good for a 25% strikeout rate.
Where Barlow struggled was throwing strikes. In his 68.1 innings he walked 45 batters and he hit six others. That’s 51 free passes handed out. Given the number of innings he threw, that is entirely too many freebies.
Over the last three seasons his walk rate has really jumped up from where it had been in the four seasons previously and his walk rate in 2025 was the highest it’s ever been. That’s usually not a good sign.
Things went better for Barlow in the 1st half where his ERA was 1.11 runs lower, his walk rate was lower, and hitters OPS was lower by 255 points. He allowed just three home runs in his first 53 games of the season. He then allowed five of them in the final 22 games of the year.
The results were better against right-handed hitters in 2025. They managed to hit just .192/.326/.272 against him while lefties hit .212/.345/.434 against him. His home and road splits were very strange. His ERA at home was 3.47 and it was 5.06 on the road. But on the road he allowed two home runs in 4.1 fewer innings compared to six at home, his walk rate was nearly identical, and he struck out significantly more batters on the road.
When looking at the pitch data we can see that Scott Barlow threw harder in 2025 than he did in 2024, but it’s still lower than any other season of his career and down three full MPH from where he was at in 2021.His velocity also fell off nearly every month of the season, with his fastball velocity per month looking like this:
| 4-seam | 2-seam | |
| March/April | 93.32 | 93.32 |
| May | 92.59 | 92.56 |
| June | 92.71 | 93.40 |
| July | 92.25 | 92.40 |
| August | 91.59 | 91.93 |
| September | 90.69 | 91.23 |
A poor second half. A lot of walks. Declining velocity. None of those things bode well for a player moving forward. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be corrected, but it is also something you shouldn’t bet on happening. Given the price you would have to gamble being $5,500,000….. well, it seems like this decision should be an easy one for the Cincinnati front office to make.
The post Cincinnati Reds Decision Time: The option on Scott Barlow appeared first on Redleg Nation.