Reds RHP undergoes Tommy John surgery; team fires three hitting coaches

Reds right-hander Julian Aguiar recently underwent Tommy John surgery and will miss the entire 2025 season, per Mark Sheldon of MLB.com. Sheldon also relays that the club has fired three coaches: hitting coach Joel McKeithan as well as assistant hitting coaches Terry Bradshaw and Tim LaMonte.

Aguiar, 23, was able to make his major league debut this year. As the Reds dealt with multiple rotation injuries, he was selected to the big league roster in August. He made seven starts, allowing 6.25 earned runs per nine innings, before landing on the 15-day injured list in September due to a right elbow sprain. It now seems that the determination was made in the past few weeks that he would require surgery. Lefty Brandon Williamson also required Tommy John surgery last month, so that’s two Cincinnati hurlers who are now slated to miss the upcoming season.

It’s an unfortunate blow for him and the team. Given that Tommy John rehabs generally take 14 months or longer, Aguiar will miss the entire 2025 campaign, depriving the club of pitching depth and costing him a year of development. Aguiar is currently listed as the club’s No. 9 prospect at Baseball America while FanGraphs had him at No. 7 in April. Both outlets consider him a possible back-end starter someday, but that will have to wait until 2026 at the earliest.

A 12th-round pick from 2021, Aguiar has climbed the ladder since then. In 2024, in addition to his major league debut, he tossed 116 1/3 innings on the farm between Double-A and Triple-A. In that time, he had a 3.79 ERA, 19.7% strikeout rate and 6% walk rate. If there’s one silver lining for Aguiar, it’s that he’ll collect major league pay and service time at least through the end of next year, assuming the Reds keep him on the roster through the winter.

Turning to the coaching staff, it was undoubtedly a disappointing year for the Cincinnati offense. The club had graduated a boatload of exciting position players in 2023 and the club had postseason aspirations going into 2024. But Cincinnati hitters put up a collective slash line of .231/.305/.388 in 2024. That production translated to a wRC+ of 87, putting them ahead of only the White Sox, Rockies, Pirates and Marlins.

It’s always tough to decipher whether credit/blame should be assigned to coaches or players, but that’s especially true in this case as the Reds were missing many of their expected contributors for much of the year. Noelvi Marté received an 80-game PED suspension in March while players like Matt McLain, TJ Friedl, Jeimer Candelario, Jake Fraley, Christian Encarnacion-Strand and others spent significant time on the injured list.

Regardless, the club has decided a significant overhaul is needed and is moving on from three hitting coaches, who all joined going into 2023. McKeithan was a minor league hitting coach for the Phillies in 2019, despite being just 26 years old for much of that season. He also worked in the Tigers’ minor league system before getting hired by the Reds as an assistant hitting coach on the major league staff for the 2022 season. One year later, he was promoted to the top hitting coach job but is now out after two seasons in that job.

Bradshaw played in the majors in the ’90s but has been a coach for a number of years now. He was working in the Royals organization back in 2000 and got promoted to their big league hitting coach job in 2018. He was fired in 2022 and came to the Reds as an assistant to McKeithan. LaMonte was also hired as an assistant on McKeithan’s staff at that time after working for the Astros and Mets.

The Reds recently fired manager David Bell and hired Terry Francona to replace him. It’s not uncommon for coaching changes to accompany managerial changes, so Francona will seemingly be looking to shake things up on the hitting side of things at least.