Cincinnati Reds designated hitter Eugenio Suárez and outfielder TJ Friedl cleared outright waivers Thursday and will still be with the team when it starts its series against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field on Friday.

The fact that the front office was willing to part with two players who have appeared in a combined 1,556 games for the Reds indicates that the team is looking toward the future with a month left in the season.

For the Reds, the advantage of either player getting picked up would have been purely economic — a team that claimed either player would be responsible for the remainder of the money left on their contract, roughly $3 million for Suárez and $700,000 for Friedl. While both players will now remain with the team through the end of the season, their respective tenures in Cincinnati will almost certainly not extend beyond that.

In February, the Reds signed Suárez to a one-year deal worth $15 million, with a $16 million mutual option for 2027 with no buyout. Placing Suárez on waivers indicates the team isn’t planning to exercise the option.

Suárez going unclaimed on waivers provides further evidence that there was little market for him at the trade deadline. Suárez, 35, is hitting .208/.295/.410 with 19 home runs in 103 games after missing nearly a month beginning in late April with an oblique injury.

Friedl signed a one-year deal worth $3.8 million in his first year of arbitration eligibility, but because of the steep dropoff in his production, he is a non-tender candidate entering his second year of arbitration.

After starting the season atop the team’s lineup and in center field, Friedl is hitting just .158/.242/.234 in 76 games. The Reds optioned the 31-year-old to Triple-A Louisville in June, and he is hitting just 1 for 34 since the All-Star break.

The act of putting players on waivers near the end of August is hardly an unusual cost-saving move for teams who are out of the playoff picture, allowing competitive teams to add postseason-eligible players to their roster before the Sept. 1 deadline. The lack of outside interest in either player, especially Suárez, who was a pivotal part of the Seattle Mariners’ run to the ALCS last season, indicates how other clubs view their ability to help a roster at this point.

The Reds are 63-71 after Wednesday’s series finale against the San Francisco Giants, 19.5 games behind the NL Central-leading Milwaukee Brewers and nine games out of wild-card position. Their next 25 games are against teams in playoff position before they end the season with three games against last year’s American League champions, the Toronto Blue Jays.

The Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) has lodged a formal complaint with Sky Sports after they broadcast an ­interview with Imran Khan’s sons, Kasim and Sulaiman, during their ­coverage of the first day’s play of the second Test against England at Lord’s.

In the interview, Khan’s ­sons raised concerns about the Pakistan government’s treatment of their father, the country’s former prime minister and World Cup-winning cricket captain, who has been held in solitary confinement for the past three years having been ousted from power in 2022. They said they feared for the 73-year-old’s life.

The 18-minute interview, conducted by former England captain Mike Atherton on Wednesday, took place in the Writers’ Room in the pavilion at Lord’s where a portrait of Imran hangs. It was broadcast during the lunch break at Lord’s on the rain-delayed first day.

The chairman of the PCB, Mohsin Naqvi, is also Pakistan’s Minister of the Interior. The exact nature of the PCB complaint is unclear, but Sky, who are aware of the complaint, declined to comment when approached by The Athletic. Pakistan have been contacted for comment.

Imran’s deteriorating health has drawn focus in recent weeks as his sons, both from his first marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, step up their efforts to secure him proper healthcare having voiced fears he may not survive prison. There have been concerns an eye condition, about which he has been complaining for some time, is worsening to the point that there are fears he may be losing much of the sight in that eye.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered him to be admitted to Shifa International Hospital in Islamabad last week. “We were cautiously optimistic,” Sulaiman told Sky. “(But) our fears were confirmed when instead of being taken to the private hospital, where he was meant to be taken, he was just taken to a government medical facility for a few hours, and then taken straight back to jail.”

Kasim added: “In reality it was an hour check up by government officials who said: ‘Great, he’s OK’ and then said we will now send him to the independent hospital, Shifa. Instead they left all the doctors waiting, our auntie waiting, who is a doctor, and sent him straight back to jail.”

Imran Khan celebrates Pakistan’s victory over England in the 1992 World Cup final (Joe Mann/Allsport/Getty Images)

Imran made his international debut for Pakistan back in 1971 and assumed the captaincy in 1982. He took 362 wickets and scored 3,807 runs in his 88 Test matches, and led his country to victory in the 1992 50-over World Cup final against England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Last week, 21 high-profile former international cricket captains — including Atherton, Nasser Hussain, Greg Chappell, Steve Waugh and India’s Sunil Gavaskar and Kapil Dev — wrote a letter to Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif urging him to ensure Imran receives proper healthcare in prison. That correspondence was a follow-up to a previous missive penned by 14 captains back in February which went unanswered by the Pakistan government.

The Pakistan government rejected allegations that Khan had been mistreated in prison or denied contact with his family and lawyers in a statement issued to the Associated Press last week, insisting that the former prime minister had received more than 900 visits from his family, lawyers and doctors since his imprisonment began in August 2023.