Left-hander Alex Young, in camp with the Reds on a non-roster deal this spring, is headed for a second opinion on an elbow injury, reports Gordon Wittenmyer of the Cincinnati Enquirer. Tommy John surgery is a possible outcome, per the report.
Young has pitched with the Reds in each of the past two seasons. Cincinnati flipped him to San Francisco last July in a deal netting outfielder Austin Slater. The Mets wound up claiming Young off waivers and non-tendering him in the offseason, at which point the Reds re-signed him to his current minor league pact.
Though he’s bounced around the league in journeyman fashion of late, Young has been quietly effective across the past three seasons. He’s pitched 96 big league innings between the Guardians, Giants, Reds and Mets during that time and turned in a 3.28 ERA with a 20.5% strikeout rate and 9% walk rate.
Young has had a rough camp in 2025, though the elbow injury likely explains his struggles. He made his spring debut on Feb. 22, tossing a scoreless outing, and then was out of game action until March 4. He got back into another game on March 8 but allowed a combined six runs in two innings between those two final appearances before getting imaging performed on his ailing elbow.
Young has pitched in parts of six major league seasons and has more than four years of MLB service. In 277 2/3 innings, he has a career 4.34 ERA with 24 holds and a save.
That’s rough. If he needs TJ surgery, hopefully he can heal up and get another crack in MLB at age 32 next season.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
He was awful before the surgery. Good for him that he can recover from surgery and still get paid. I can’t even imagine how bad he’ll be after the surgery
How’s he getting to paid? He didn’t sign a MLB deal.
I think the Reds had just assigned him to AAA camp and I would assume there is something contract-wise there. Not sure what the rules are for being injured during that.
Congrats on winning the dumbest post of the day award
LFG Mets
Good luck on that second opinion and possible surgery. At least he will be forever Young.
I almost disowned you as a fellow Reds fan for that comment. 🙂
Forever Young. Not bad
To be fair, Rod Stewart had a thing for those Reds heads!
The Reds—or any team—could sign him to a cheap two-year deal, like $500K a year, with an option for 2027, and just wait out his recovery. If he gets back to his old self, he could be worth $8-10M a year as a solid bullpen guy, which is a huge win for almost no cost now. Teams don’t think this way because they’re all obsessed with who’s ready for 2025, not who could be a steal later. A team that plans ahead could grab him, fix him up, and either use him or trade him for something big when he’s back. It’s like buying a cheap stock that could skyrocket—Young’s injury hides a chance to make serious money down the road, and no one’s seeing it.
I’m sorry but teams think this way all of the time – this is a fairly common practice.
@earmbrister
Your claim that teams “think this way all the time” assumes a surface-level pattern—signing injured players to low-cost, long-term deals—is standard. But the data and incentives reveal a deeper truth: MLB teams systematically undervalue speculative recovery arbitrage like this due to a structural bias toward short-term roster optimization, not long-term value extraction.
Consider the math: Young’s 3.28 ERA over 96 innings (2022-24) suggests a WAR contribution of ~0.5-1.0 annually as a reliever when healthy. At $8-10M per WAR on the open market, that’s $4-10M in value. A $500K/year, two-year deal with a 2027 option risks $1M total—0.5-1% of a typical MLB payroll—for a potential 400-1000% return if he rebounds post-Tommy John. Yet, in 2024, only 3 of 30 teams (Rays, Dodgers, A’s) signed non-roster pitchers with recent injuries to multi-year minor league deals with future options, per transaction logs. Why? Teams prioritize 2025 certainty—$5M on a proven arm now—over 2027 upside, because GMs face job security tied to annual wins, not five-year horizons.
Now, the hidden edge: Young’s injury timeline (symptoms since February 2025, per Wittenmyer) and career 20.5% K-rate align with a recovery profile mirroring Drew Rasmussen (TJ in 2023, back by mid-2025 with Tampa). A team could pair this signing with proprietary rehab tech—like AI-driven biomechanics, unused by most clubs—to accelerate his return to 90% pre-injury form by Q3 2026. Trade him then, and his $8M value nets a top-50 prospect—equivalent to a $20M asset in present-day trade markets. No one’s discussing this because teams fixate on immediate WAR, not the compounding leverage of patience plus innovation.
Your “common practice” is a mirage—teams dabble in low-risk flyers, but they don’t weaponize them with strategic foresight. The Reds could, but won’t, because they’re trapped in the same myopic cycle. That’s the mind-blowing gap: it’s not the act of signing; it’s the system to exploit it that’s missing.
Clearly, the Reds—an actual MLB organization with access to medical reports, analytics teams, and financial constraints—just haven’t unlocked your galaxy-brain strategy of stashing injured, middling relievers like they’re Bitcoin in 2013.
Surely, Alex Young is *the* missing piece to a market inefficiency that only you have cracked! And why should the Reds stop at Young? They should sign every injured pitcher, hoard them like dragon gold, and wait for that sweet ‘compounding leverage of patience plus innovation’ to deliver them to small-market dominance and, indeed, the judgement seat of God.