Former Reds GM says the quiet part out loud about Kyle Schwarber future destination

If you were hoping this winter would end with Kyle Schwarber parking baseballs on the banks of the Ohio, former Cincinnati Reds GM Jim Bowden just tossed a pretty big bucket of cold water on that dream. In laying out the likely destinations for Schwarber, Bowden didn’t include Cincinnati, and that omission says more than a thousand rumor-mill words. 

It’s not that Schwarber wouldn’t mash at Great American Ball Park (he would) or that the Reds don’t need a thumping DH (they do). It’s that the price tag attached to a premium, market-setting slugger simply doesn’t align with how this front office has chosen to build.

Reds fans know the price on Kyle Schwarber isn’t happening

That’s the part local fans understand better than the national discourse: the Reds have been threading a specific needle, youth, depth, cost control, and flexibility, rather than dropping a Brink’s truck on a single bat. Schwarber’s brand is star power and October thunder; Cincinnati’s brand, at least in this era, is spreading resources across a young core and avoiding deals that create long-term drag on the payroll. When Bowden leaves the Reds off his board, he’s not snubbing the city; he’s acknowledging the math.

And that math is loud. The “salary comps” conversation for Schwarber has been orbiting names like Rafael Devers (10 years, $313.5 million) and Giancarlo Stanton (13 years, $325 million) on the mega-commitment end, with shorter-term but high-AAV deals such as Alex Bregman (3 years, $120 million) and Pete Alonso (1 year, $30 million) illustrating the neighborhood of the yearly sticker price.

Nobody’s saying Schwarber is a one-to-one comp for those players; the point is the tier. If the ask lives anywhere near $30 million per year, or requires the kind of term that warps roster planning, the Reds are stepping off the ride.

Even Reds fans know that’s not happening. You can believe the front office wants a thunderbolt in the middle of the order and still recognize they’re not about to vault into a contract stratosphere they’ve avoided for years. Schwarber’s value is obvious: elite on-base via walks, 40-homer juice, postseason pedigree, and a bat tailor-made for a hitter-friendly park. But he’s a DH-first piece with limited defensive value, and that profile is precisely the kind of acquisition small-to-mid payroll clubs treat with extra caution when the years and dollars start to swell.

So what does that mean for Cincinnati? It likely means shopping in the lanes they’ve favored: shorter-term power adds, buy-low swings on right-handed thump to pair in a DH platoon, or leveraging prospect depth for a controllable bat via trade. It means trusting internal growth from a talented position-player group and using financial flexibility to build a deeper 1-through-9 rather than betting the farm on one marquee name. The Reds can still upgrade the DH spot, just not at a Schwarber price point.

Bowden didn’t “bury” the Reds by excluding them. It’s simple: the player, the market, and the team’s spending habits don’t intersect. And that’s okay. Cincinnati doesn’t need to win the winter headline to win more baseball games. They need one or two smart bats that fit the budget, stretch the lineup, and keep the window propped open, not painted shut by a contract they’ll regret.