Reds’ latest trade rumors are amazing news for Yankees

There’s no game-changing pitching option on the trade market — except Luis Castillo, who’s now available, Yankees fans!

For months, we’ve felt like Dewey Cox’s father watching the Reds dip their toes into the trade market with Sonny Gray instead of Luis Castillo — “Wrong pitcher traded,” with zero benefit to the Yankees.

But as the offseason digs deeper, it appears Cincinnati is relenting, finally presenting a valuable option for the Yankees to consider pushing all their chips in for.

Pitching-needy teams have long considered the Reds’ ace their white whale. When Castillo was developing, he was too expensive an acquisition.

Then he crested just as the Reds became contenders, and chose to do the noble thing and be…actually good, importing both Sonny Gray and Trevor Bauer.

Unfortunately, the reality of 2021 has now clashed with the team’s plans, and Cincinnati is now poised to be yet another central-division team that will cut future costs instead of bolster their roster. If Gray was their sole chip, the Yankees were never going to engage. But if Castillo’s now being discussed? That makes exactly one game-changer in the Yanks’ market.

And if the Pirates are going to demand a king’s ransom for Jameson Taillon, the Yankees should walk that same ransom over to the Reds and see if they’d rather do business.

Castillo has parlayed his devastating changeup into two consecutive masterful seasons, striking out 226 men in 190.2 innings pitched in 2019 before following that effort up in ’20 with 89 in 70 innings.

Still just 28 years old, Castillo is eligible for arbitration for the first time this offseason, and will be under team control through 2023.

Prior to Sunday morning, all Castillo trade talks were hypothetical, and were antithetical to any of the Reds’ public pronouncements and team-building methods.

If the righty is on the table, though, that marks one actual Yankees target on the current market that they should discuss overpaying for.

And with a paper-thin rotation and very little public interest in the current free agent options, they’d be foolish not to pursue.

Yankees: 3 missed opportunities that doomed NYY for 2021

The New York Yankees have been somewhat doomed by passing on these three impactful decisions over the past several seasons.