Reds Designate Mike Ford For Assignment

The Reds announced Wednesday that they’ve reinstated outfielder TJ Friedl from the injured list and opened a spot on the roster by designating first baseman/designated hitter Mike Ford for assignment.

Ford, 31, signed a pair of minor league deals with the Reds and opted out both times, only to eventually return on a big league deal earlier this month. The lefty slugger demolished spring training opposition at a .455/.486/.727 pace and hit .297/.381/.538 through 105 Triple-A plate appearances to begin the season. That eye-popping production didn’t carry over into the big leagues, however. In 62 plate appearances for Cincinnati, Ford hit .150/.177/.233 with a homer and a triple.

Ford’s 24.2% strikeout rate with the Reds is only a bit higher than average, but he’s hit too many grounders (44.4%) for a lumbering slugger and is making hard contact well below both his career norms and the league-average levels. He’s averaged 86.4 mph off the bat and put just one-third of his batted balls in play at 95 mph or greater.

While Ford has struggled considerably in his small sample of playing in Cincinnati, he’s just months removed from providing the 2023 Mariners with plenty of thump in the season’s second half. Ford tallied 251 plate appearances in Seattle last season, and although his 32.3% strikeout rate was an eyesore, it was an acceptable trade-off for his .228/.323/.475 batting line and 16 round-trippers in his 84 games with the club.

With a career .205/.298/.402 batting line, Ford is something of a prototypical three-true-outcomes player. He’s walked at a 10% clip, fanned in 26% of his career plate appearances and also homered in just shy of 5% of his MLB plate appearances. He has clear power and some plate discipline but at times gets too passive in the box. Ford’s contact rate on pitches in the strike zone is right in line with the big league average, and he’s only slightly below-average when swinging at balls off the plate. However, he’s swung at just 39.9% of the pitches he’s seen in his career, which checks in quite a bit shy of the league average (which typically clocks in around 47% in any given season).

The Reds will have a week to trade Ford, attempt to pass him through outright waivers or release him. If Ford passes through outright waivers unclaimed, he’ll be able to reject a minor league assignment in favor of free agency.