The Reds Put Eugenio Suárez on Waivers Hours After His Grand Slam. Baseball Is Undefeated.
Suárez capped a ninth-inning comeback with a grand slam — and by the end of the night Cincinnati had placed him on waivers in a cost-cutting move. He went unclaimed and stayed.
August 27, 2026 at 12:36 AM EDT
1 min read
Baseball scripts do not get much better than this one. On August 26, Eugenio Suárez hit a ninth-inning grand slam to help the Reds claw back from a 9-3 hole and beat the Giants 10-9. A few hours later, Cincinnati placed him — and outfielder TJ Friedl — on outright waivers.
The grand slam and the waiver wire, the same night. You cannot make it up.
What actually happened
Outright waivers are not a release. Placing Suárez on them gave the other 29 teams a 48-hour window to claim him and take on the rest of his one-year, $15 million contract — a straightforward cost-cutting move for the Reds. Neither player was designated for assignment, and both kept playing while the process ran.
The ending is the un-dramatic part: Suárez and Friedl both went unclaimed and remained with Cincinnati. No team wanted the salary badly enough to put in a claim.
The read
That nobody claimed a player who just hit a walk-off-adjacent grand slam tells you more about August payroll math than about Suárez — a 49-homer bat last season doesn't lose value because of one waiver placement. For the Reds, it was a cost gambit that didn't pay off in savings, so the status quo holds. For everyone else, it was a reminder that in baseball the box score and the business office are running on completely different clocks.