For Reds, Trading Zack Cozart and Jay Bruce Inevitable

Look for more veterans to be traded this season as the Cincinnati Reds continue their rebuilding process.

When a team is nine and a half games out of the wild card standings in early June, it usually means they will be a seller at the trade deadline.

That is the situation in which the Cincinnati Reds now find themselves. It should surprise no one if they start dealing veteran players to contending teams for more prospects. Last offseason, when the Reds began to dump salary with the trades of Todd Frazier and Aroldis Chapman, they kept a couple of veterans. Jay Bruce was almost traded during Spring Training, but it fell through in the final hours. Zack Cozart was coming off major knee surgery, and thus no one was going to trade for him at that time.

The other two veterans, Brandon Phillips and Joey Votto, likely won’t be traded because of their no-trade clauses. That leaves Cozart and Bruce as the two players whose salaries constitute a huge chunk of payroll and can be traded fairly easily. While Bruce has a limited no-trade clause to 10 teams, there are potential playoff teams who would take Bruce for the stretch run. Cozart is having such a great season that his trade value has never been higher.

Both players have bolstered their trade value through the first two months of 2016. Bruce is having a decent season. He’s hitting .280/.332/.591, with an OPS of .922. He has 11 doubles, 13 HR, 40 RBI, and leads MLB with five triples. His strikeout-to-walk ratio (45-to-14) isn’t the best, but Bruce has always been a high-strikeout batter. His .299 BABIP is also higher than his career average. Since May 9, Bruce has played even better. He has a .337 batting average, a .341 OBP and a .654 slugging. His OPS is 1.134, and has 29 hits, with eight of those hits being home runs.

Meanwhile, Cozart is having the best season of his career, and quite possibly an All-Star season. With an OPS of .861, he has eight HR, 16 doubles, and 22 RBI.  His slash line of .303/.333/.528 is by far his best in the majors and the best of his professional career since he hit .310 in Louisville in 2011. Cozart is still not getting on base via walk a lot, but he only has 25 strikeouts in 192 plate appearances. His BABIP is also little higher than Bruce’s at .309. Cozart went through a bit of a slump in May, but has rebounded nicely through the first week of June.

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Cozart isn’t a free agent until 2018, but he is arbitration eligible in 2017. If the Reds are truly rebuilding, adding payroll for a 30-year-old shortstop isn’t what they want to be doing, especially with Jose Peraza waiting in the wings. It’s hard to believe that Bruce, though younger than Cozart by a year, is a free agent after 2016. He does have an option the Reds could pick up for 2017, but I think if the Reds were serious about keeping Bruce, they probably would have already picked up his option.

As a fan, it disappoints me that Cozart and Bruce won’t be on this team at the end of the season, if not the end of July. Bruce gave me my favorite moment, the 2010 clinch game, at GABP in my lifetime and I’ve been an unapologetic Cozart fan since he debuted in 2011. You would be hard pressed to find someone more disappointed than myself once both are traded.

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But I also understand the economics of baseball, and as a team in a smaller TV market, the Reds just aren’t going to have enough to pay those two players when the team is good again. It might be a little risky to trade either one of these players if the Reds are going to have a chance to compete next season, but with upcoming prospects in Jesse Winker and Peraza, Cozart and Bruce are the two players who would be the easiest to trade.