Last offseason, the Reds assembled a frankly confusing amount of infield depth. With the emergence of Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, and Noelvi Marte, there weren’t many spaces available to start with. They signed Jeimer Candelario, and already had Christian Encarnacion-Strand as an option at first. Spencer Steer moonlights in the infield too. That left Jonathan India as an odd man out, and he seemed like a clear trade candidate merely waiting for a good home.
In 2024, that good home turned out to be Cincinnati. McLain missed the entire year after shoulder surgery. Encarnacion-Strand got hurt in May and didn’t return. Marte got suspended for PED use. When all was said and done, the Reds ended up trading for infield depth in Santiago Espinal. India played in 151 games and supplied his usual OBP-heavy offense.
Holding onto India worked out for the Reds last year, but there’s no way they could’ve tried the same plan again. That would’ve been just too many resources committed to one subset of the team, and Cincinnati has needs across the roster. So after many months, the trade we’ve all been expecting for roughly a year has come to pass. The Reds traded India and outfielder Joey Wiemer to the Royals in exchange for righty starter Brady Singer.
At first blush, this trade feels strange from the Reds’ standpoint. India might be a luxury good for their team, but he’s a legitimately good hitter with two years of reasonably priced team control remaining. He was their third-best hitter by WAR, and the Reds need people on base to take advantage of their homer-friendly stadium. Singer was Kansas City’s fourth starter, and 700 innings into his career, he’s not exactly a mystery box: He’ll give you a 4-ish ERA if you can put a good defense behind him. Not only that, but the Reds had to throw in Wiemer just to get things done. What gives?
What gives is that my description of Singer was unnecessarily harsh. He’s a fourth starter only because the Royals had three excellent options at the top of their rotation last year. Meanwhile, the Reds struggled to cobble together a full rotation last season despite a breakout year from Hunter Greene and a strong finish from Nick Martinez. Singer is roughly league average – and the Reds rotation was comfortably worse than that. He slots in as their third starter for me, and they could badly use the depth even if the innings aren’t quite Cy Young caliber.
You don’t have to project improvement from Singer to understand how he could help the Reds. If he can make 30 starts and keep the ball on the ground – a strength throughout his career – he’ll replace some truly dire innings from last year’s staff. He might not have huge strikeout stuff, but he rarely walks anyone, and the next time he allows a league-average number of home runs will be the first. Few fans get excited about players like Brady Singer – but nearly every major league GM is tripping over themselves to acquire more like him if the price is right.
You also could convince yourself that Singer has more left in him, if you were so inclined. He throws his best pitch, a tight slider with sneaky downward movement, in pretty much any count and to pretty much any hitter. Everything else in his game builds off of that slider. That sounds like an arsenal that should come with some strikeouts, because the pitch is legitimately good. But he backs it up with a mix of uninspiring fastballs, leaning on the shape of his sinker to keep the ball on the ground rather than throwing something with the intent of missing bats.
If the Reds could coax something more like a usable four-seamer out of Singer, even if he’s only using it in a few favorable counts, he’d improve on his strikeout numbers considerably. If he could add an offspeed pitch – his current changeup is hardly worth mentioning – he could cut into his sharp platoon splits. Start with an average pitcher, and it’s easy to imagine how things could improve.
Realistically, that’s an unlikely outcome. If Singer were going to turn into a bat-missing monster, he probably would have by now. Pitchers aren’t inanimate lumps of clay to be acted upon by clever teams; they’re out there trying to improve themselves already, with offseason throwing programs and pitching laboratories available to all. It’s reasonable to assume that this is what Singer is: a solid pitcher who you’ll always feel a little bit uncomfortable about starting in the playoffs.
Here’s the thing, though: That’s pretty comparable to the value India provides on offense. Four years into a career that started with Rookie of the Year honors, he’s compiled a 107 wRC+. He’s a patient hitter with a good sense of the strike zone, but he doesn’t have the power to make pitchers pay for mistakes in the same way that truly great hitters do.
That’s not meant as a pejorative. If you’re looking for a hitter who will get on base at a healthy clip, put the ball in play, and rack up extra base hits occasionally through sheer volume, India fits the bill. He’s fast enough to make plays on the basepaths too. It all works out to a better-than-average hitter, and those don’t grow on trees. The Royals gave 3,700 plate appearances to batters who finished the season with a wRC+ lower than 100 last year, just to give you an idea of how helpful India’s contributions could be.
That offensive prowess is India’s best skill, and it makes him a good leadoff hitter. Combine that with plus defense at an up-the-middle spot, and you’d have an All Star. The problem is, India’s not a great defender. He’s better suited to first base or DH than second, where he’s compiled some of the worst numbers in the majors over the past four seasons. Teams only get to play so many players at positions lower on the defensive spectrum, and India’s bat doesn’t stand out as much against that cohort.
I think the Rookie of the Year win anchored people to expect a level of offensive production from India that he isn’t likely to reach. If he were 30 or 40% better than average offensively, the equation would look different, and those rarefied heights felt achievable after he burst onto the scene with a .269/.376/.459 slash line and 21 homers. But each of those statistics remain his career highs.
That’s not to say that India can’t improve. Just as in Singer’s case, I can imagine a version of India that takes the same basic building blocks and changes things around the margins to create better outcomes. He could focus more on lifting and pulling middle-up pitches, the part of the plate where he does the most damage. Given his strong contact skills and plate discipline, hunting a pitch and trying to catch it out front for a pulled fly ball seems like a reasonable approach to unlock a bit more power to go with his walks and singles.
Like in Singer’s case, I don’t find that change very likely. We’ve seen 2,228 plate appearances of India in the majors, and he’s succeeded without a pull-centric approach. The most likely outcome for him in 2025 is more of the same, which suits the Royals just fine.
The core of this trade is a mismatch of surpluses. The Reds had more hitters than places to play them and a threadbare pitching staff. The Royals liked their rotation quite a bit but didn’t have enough going on offensively. The salaries and team control are close; Singer’s earning a bit more, and both will become free agents after the 2026 season. The skillsets are also similar – slightly above average in an unexciting way.
The Royals netted Wiemer in the exchange because Singer has a more universally valuable skillset. More teams need pitchers than bat-first second basemen, and so Kansas City was able to get a second intriguing player to make the scales balance.
Wiemer was a fringe top 100 prospect in the Brewers system before he debuted as an injury replacement in 2023. He has huge raw tools, with blazing speed and plus power to all fields. He struggles mightily to make contact, however, and a down 2024 saw him go from potential platoon starter to struggling minor leaguer who was traded from Milwaukee to Cincinnati at the deadline. His inclusion in this trade is mostly as a lottery ticket. If he can get his contact issues under control, he’d be a natural in cavernous Kauffman Stadium. If he can’t, he might still be a good fourth outfielder and defensive replacement in a park that makes outfield defense play up. That’s a solid addition, though certainly not an earth-shattering one; he’ll likely start 2025 at Triple-A.
It might sound clichéd at this point, but I like this trade for both teams. I disliked the way the Reds built their team last year. There were just too many infielders and not enough spots, particularly for a team trying to win with limited resources. It’s not so much the salary outlay – some of Cincinnati’s best players are pre-arbitration guys — but the Reds are never going to field a team full of All-Stars. There will always be holes to patch with the best available budget option. Having Singer on the team instead of India reduces the number of holes and does so affordably.
Kansas City’s side isn’t quite so clear, because India makes the team’s DH and second base rotations tricky, but I still think it was worth it for a club that has great pitching but struggles to score runs. Like Cincinnati, the Royals are always going to be dealing with a few weak points given their budget constraints. India feels like a bigger incremental gain over his potential replacement than Singer for the Royals, and they saved a bit of money in the bargain while adding an intriguing young player. I think the various fringe benefits offset the potential roster headache.
More broadly speaking, this trade says a lot about how teams value established players under short-term team control. From a raw surplus value standpoint, these two players are good deals. They’re going to make less money than they’d cost to acquire on the free agent market, and they’ll do so for two years. But they’re not making that much less, and they aren’t that much better than average.
Modern teams covet club control and cost savings. But they particularly value those attributes when one side or the other is an unbelievable deal – six years of an All-Star or Ozzie Albies for pennies on the dollar. They also covet star power; six years of a two-win player is much less interesting than three years of a four-win option. Plenty of contenders would eschew a trade like this entirely; they look for their Singers and Indias either internally or in free agency.
This trade worked because the Reds and Royals don’t behave like your average contender, even though they both have playoff aspirations. That made for a beneficial link-up, albeit a year later than I expected from Cincinnati’s side. I think both sides will be quite happy with this deal in six months’ time.
