Reds insider drops a bold Elly De La Cruz take that feels wildly premature

The Cincinnati Reds are already living in the uncomfortable part of the Elly De La Cruz conversation: they tried to get ahead of the price, and it didn’t work. They made De La Cruz an offer that would’ve made him the highest-paid Red ever, and he turned it down. That alone tells you how high Elly’s camp believes the ceiling is — and how quickly this can become less about “what’s fair” and more about “what’s possible.”

Now, C. Trent Rosecrans, whose podcast is part of the Foul Territory Network, casually tossed out that De La Cruz “could be a billion-dollar player.” And yeah — that one hit like getting splashed with ice water you didn’t order.

A billion? That kind of number changes the entire language around a player. It changes how you cover him, talk about him, and how a fanbase starts quietly practicing the goodbye speech in the mirror.

Right now? It feels wildly premature, because Elly hasn’t done the billion-dollar part yet. At least not consistently, and not cleanly enough to turn this into a financial fairy tale where everything magically works out and Cincinnati just… keeps him forever because the vibes are immaculate.

This Elly De La Cruz money take is thrilling, but it’s way too soon to crown the Reds' star

None of this is an Elly critique just for the fun of it. The talent is obvious. He’s the most breathtaking athlete the Reds have had in what feels like forever, and Cincinnati should be thrilled they get to watch him every day.

But “billion-dollar player” isn’t the vibe. It’s a career arc. It’s multiple elite seasons stacked on top of each other, alongside October moments that make you unavoidable, it’s a profile that sells itself worldwide, and it’s a level of week-to-week dominance that turns hype into inevitability. Elly is still on the way there. And that matters when you start throwing around numbers that only apply to the potential of a superstar.

The reality is De La Cruz is still a loud-edges player, and the Reds don’t have to pretend otherwise. His game is built on chaos — the kind that brings swing-and-miss, defensive volatility, and stretches where the rawness shows up just as loudly as the greatness. It’s the cost of having a player whose highlight reel looks like a video game. But if you’re going to attach “billion” to a name, you’re basically saying the wobbly parts are temporary footnotes and the MVP version is the permanent setting. That’s quite the leap.

Why turn the pressure up to 11 for no good reason? Cincinnati is still trying to build the kind of team that makes staying feel meaningful, not just lucrative. “Billion-dollar player” talk doesn’t help that. It just shifts the emotional center of the conversation from, “How do the Reds win with Elly?” to, “How long until this becomes someone else’s problem?”

The most honest way to frame it is this: De La Cruz doesn’t need to be a billion-dollar player for this to get complicated fast. If he’s “only” a perennial All-Star, a guy who lives on MVP ballots without always winning them, that’s still the kind of player who eventually outgrows franchise-record offers.

So sure, Rosecrans might be trying to describe the ceiling. But Cincinnati doesn’t need ceiling talk right now. The Reds need traction. Because the real threat to the Reds isn’t that Elly becomes a “billion-dollar player.” It’s that he becomes exactly what everyone already knows he can be — and the Reds still aren’t built strongly enough to keep the story from drifting toward the exit.