Dragons 2025 Team Preview, Part 2: First Basemen

As the spring calendar marches forward, so does the progression toward the start of the 2025 baseball season for the Dayton Dragons. Today, the Dragons and the two other Cincinnati Reds farm clubs, Chattanooga and Daytona, open their spring training schedules with games against other minor league workout groups, while Louisville opened on Saturday. Spring games will continue through March 29. Games are played on the back fields at the Reds spring training complex in Goodyear, Arizona.

The Dragons will celebrate a special year in 2025, their 25^th season of operation as a Cincinnati Reds affiliate in the Midwest League. The Dragons annual home “Opening Night” game is set for Tuesday, April 8 against the Fort Wayne TinCaps at 7:05 pm at Day Air Ballpark. The Dragons will officially open their season on the road in 2025, four days prior to their home opener, when they battle the West Michigan Whitecaps in Grand Rapids, Michigan at 6:35 pm on April 4.

Meanwhile, the Reds close out their spring training schedule with a game in Dayton at Day Air Ballpark on March 25 at 6:10 pm. The Reds will battle a team of minor league prospects in that game. This will be the fourth visit to Dayton by the Reds, who also closed out their spring schedule at Day Air Ballpark in 2007, 2009, and 2017.

This is part two of an eight-part positional preview of the candidates for the Dragons 2025 roster. Players listed here are candidates for positions on the Dragons season-opening roster.

This preview is an unofficial projection of possible roster candidates. Minor League rosters are not established until April 1. Spring training variables including performance, injuries, trades, and additional player acquisitions will impact the roster accordingly.

For Dragons season ticket or group ticket information, go to daytondragons.com/tickets or call (937) 228-2287.

The First Basemen

Click links on each name for career stats and player information.

Candidates: Cade Hunter, Carter Graham, John Michael Faile, Jack Moss

Cade Hunter, who had 45 starts at the catcher position and 42 starts at first base for the Dragons in 2024, was profiled as a catcher in our first positional preview here. If Hunter returns to the Dragons in 2025, he could potentially get an even higher number of starts at first base. It should be noted that former Dragon Cam Collier, who was projected to start the 2024 season at Double-A Chattanooga as a first baseman, suffered a thumb injury last week and will begin the 2025 season on the injured list. His absence will create playing time for someone else in Chattanooga (probably former Dragon Ruben Ibarra) and could shuffle the deck a bit in terms of opening day roster assignments.

Carter Graham spent the second half of the 2024 season with the Dragons and made 27 starts at first base. Graham opened the 2024 season at Low-A Daytona. He can also play third base.

Graham was the Reds eighth round draft pick in 2023 out of Stanford University. Graham is a Los Angeles native who played high school baseball at Chaminade College Prep in West Hills, California, where he was the school’s Male Athlete of the Year all four years. He went on to Stanford and played three seasons in Palo Alto. Graham’s best year came in 2022 as a sophomore, when he was named by Baseball America as a Second Team All-American and led the PAC 12 in home runs with 22, fourth most in a season in Stanford history. He also finished second in the conference in RBI while batting .331 in 64 games, leading Stanford to the College World Series. Graham had another good season as a junior in 2023, batting .315 with 15 home runs in 64 games.

After being drafted by the Reds in 2023, Graham played briefly at Daytona at the end of that season and then opened the 2024 season back with Daytona. With the Tortugas in ’24, Graham played in 49 games and batted .235 with three home runs. He was promoted to the Dragons at the end of the first half and split time with Hunter at first base the rest of the season. In 34 games with the Dragons, Graham batted .188 with five home runs.

Graham is a very smart player who plays hard, runs the bases with great instincts and hustle, and seems to add more to his team that the numbers would suggest. As the Dragons were battling for a playoff berth late in the 2024 season, Graham had some big moments. On August 22 against Cedar Rapids, he spurred a bottom of the ninth inning game-winning rally, drawing a lead-off walk in a tie game and eventually scoring the winning run. He had hit a home run earlier in the same game. On August 31 against West Michigan, in arguably the Dragons biggest win of the year, he hit a two-run home run and made an impact with his baserunning in a Dragons comeback, walk-off win. Graham plays good defense at first base and can fill in at third if needed. He is 23 years old, is 6’2”, 228 lbs., and bats right-handed.

John Michael Faile became one of the most compelling stories of the Dragons 2024 season. Faile enjoyed a record-breaking college career as a catcher at NCAA Division II North Greenville University in South Carolina, where one of his coaches was former Reds catcher Eddie Taubensee. Faile broke the all-time career RBI record, not just for the school, but for college baseball’s entire Division II level, and he won his conference’s triple crown in 2022. Faile hit over .400 for two straight seasons in 2021 and 2022 while hitting 39 home runs in just 99 games over those two seasons. Despite all of that, he was not drafted and instead signed to play in the Pioneer League, an independent circuit that operates in partnership with Major League Baseball. Faile played for Billings, a Reds farm club for decades before the reorganization of the minor leagues in 2021 that moved them out of affiliated baseball. Faile played in 54 games for Billings in 2023 and blasted 21 home runs while batting .353. His OPS of 1.175 was in line with his college numbers at North Greenville. The Reds signed Faile prior to the start of the 2024 season.

Faile began his affiliated professional career in 2024 at the lowest level in the Reds system, with the ACL Reds in Goodyear, Arizona. He kept on hitting, despite not exactly receiving regular playing time, even at that modest level of competition. He appeared in 25 of his team’s 60 games and batted .333 with three home runs and a 1.018 OPS, grinding it out in a tough league to play in, where Arizona temperatures easily surpass 100 degrees and games are played on fields with no paying fans and little feel for real drama. His team’s season ended on July 25, but Faile, like most ACL players, remained in Arizona with his teammates for additional work. Three weeks later, after a couple of injuries to Dayton players, he was transferred to the Dragons, and that is when things became very interesting.

Faile’s first game with the Dragons came on August 15 at Fort Wayne. That night had to feel special for Faile, as he got the opportunity to play in an affiliated league in an actual ballpark full of fans for the first time ever. His performance had to make the wait worthwhile. He hit a home run in his second plate appearance and finished the night with three hits. The next night, Faile hit another home run. And in his third game, he blasted a grand slam. In his first three games in full-season affiliated ball, Faile, the former college Division II and pro Independent League superstar, had hit three home runs and driven in six runs while batting .429!

Faile had hits in nine of his first 11 games with the Dragons, the biggest of which came in that August 31 game against West Michigan, as the Dragons put themselves in prime position to clinch a playoff berth. He delivered a walk-off RBI single in the bottom of the ninth of that game to give the Dragons a win. When the playoffs actually began, Faile was in the starting lineup for both games as the Dragons designated hitter, earning playing time in important games, something that might have seemed unlikely a month earlier when Faile was laboring in the Arizona heat, his season apparently over. In 16 games with the Dragons, Faile finished at .231 due to a 0 for 18 finish to the season. He hit four home runs in 65 at-bats with Dayton.

While Faile was a college catcher, he probably projects as a first baseman going forward. In his 25 games with the ACL Reds, 15 came at first base, with six as a DH. He had two starts at catcher. With the Dragons, 13 of his 16 games came as a DH, with two starts at first base and one behind the plate. When the Dragons took infield practice after Faile’s arrival, he was usually at first base. Faile, 24 years old, is 6’1”, 210 lbs.

Jack Moss is the last of the candidates for first base in this preview, and he is the only one of the group who has yet to play in Dayton. Moss was an 11^th round draft pick by the Reds in 2023 out of Texas A&M.

Moss came out of Cherry Creek High School in Greenwood Village, Colorado, where he was selected as the Colorado Player of the Year in 2020 as a senior. He was highly-regarded as a pro prospect coming out of high school, ranked by Baseball America on their list of the top 300 college/high school players entering the draft in 2020, but he instead elected to enroll at Arizona State University. He played one season for the Sun Devils in 2021, seeing plenty of playing time as a freshman and batting .299 with six home runs in 48 games. He transferred to Texas A&M after his freshman year and went on to play two seasons there in 2022 and ’23. He had an outstanding sophomore season in 2022, starting all 64 games for the Aggies, and batting a robust .380 with six home runs and a fine .957 OPS. He led the Southeastern Conference in hits and missed winning the conference batting title by just three points. He had a particularly strong post-season as he earned SEC All-Tournament honors and then hit .643 in the College Station Regional to earn the MVP of the tourney. He helped Texas A&M to the College World Series, where they finished tied for third. As a junior in 2023, Moss improved his on-base percentage but could not quite duplicate his other numbers, finishing the year by batting .355 with four home runs in 65 games. He was again named to the SEC All-Tournament team as well as the All-Regional team. Moss did not play any position other than first base in his three years of college baseball, batting a combined .352 with 16 home runs in 177 games.

Moss spent the 2024 season with Daytona, playing in 82 games and batting .262, though he did not connect on a home run in the pitcher-friendly Florida State League. Moss overcame a very slow start to the season. He was hitting just .223 as late as June 6, but he batted .336 from June 7 to August 8 with a .400 on-base percentage during that period. The league average for the 2024 season in the Florida State League was just .229, so Moss showed some skills as a hitter. Moss, 23, is 6’5”, 205 lbs., and bats left-handed.

Next up: Second Basemen