For the first time since 2019, Luke Maile won’t have to be scouting a new city to live in.
The Covington Catholic grad re-signed with the Cincinnati Reds on Thursday for a one-year, $3.5 million dollar contract with a club option for the 2025 season.
Maile’s career over the last three seasons has taken him to Milwaukee in 2021, Cleveland in ’22 and Cincinnati for the ’23 season. With the Reds, he hit a career-high six home runs this past season and appeared in 74 games, logging 199 plate appearances and hitting .235. He threw out 17 runners behind the plate, which was also a career-high, his caught stealing rate at 23%.
Despite being mainly a part-time catcher, he ranked tied for 14th in the majors with catching 11 runners trying to steal second base.
Maile is expected to continue the role of backup catcher to Tyler Stephenson while helping groom a young pitching staff. As the season went along, Maile was the primary catcher for Andrew Abbott.
On Sept. 26, he became the first Reds catcher with a home run, three RBIs and a stolen base in a single game since Johnny Bench performed the feat in 1978.
Maile is a 2009 CovCath graduate. He’s the school’s career record holder in batting average (.481), hits (198), doubles (44), triples (13) home runs (29), runs scored (178), runs batted in (187) and bases on balls (115).
He was Kentucky’s Mr. Baseball his senior year with the Colonels and has played eight seasons in the Major Leagues, starting with Tampa Bay in 2015. He played two seasons in Tampa Bay, three in Toronto and then one-year stops with Milwaukee and Cleveland before arriving in Cincinnati.
Maile was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2009 but did not sign, instead choosing to play at the University of Kentucky, where he was second-team all-Southeastern Conference and a semifinalist for the Golden Spikes Award and the Dick Howser Trophy before he was through. Tampa Bay selected Maile in the eighth round of the 2012 amateur draft.