It happened the way it always seems to happen here in Sports January as the winter gloom encroaches on the lingering light of these too short days. Who Dey gave way, first to Why Dey and finally to When Dey; as in, When Dey Gonna Beat Dem Expectations.
Yes, there’s X and UC basketball. There’s kickball over on the west side of downtown. But they remain little more than an amuse bouche in a city that lives and dies by its two big boy professional teams owned by men of bourgeois means and conservative wallets.
But at least we had the Terry Francona hire to keep us warm.
The surprise hire of Francona led many fans to believe this year would be different. Wallets would be opened. Ducats would fly because surely Tito doesn’t take this job without assurances that name talent would be brought in to shore up roster holes.
I, for one, never bought into that hopeful narrative. I’ve seen too much. So, when the Reds held Francona’s Welcome to Reds Country presser, I was unsurprised to hear the new skipper shoot down any notion of a front office promise to substantially increase player payroll. No overt cynicism here, however warranted; I just recalled something Maya Angelou once famously said: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Nearly a year before Phil Castellini—born with a silver foot in his mouth—delivered those memorably ill-conceived remarks before the Rooters Organized to Stimulate Interest and Enthusiasm in the Cincinnati Reds (the philanthropic group known as the Rosie Reds), ownership’s boy wonder had already outlined the new way forward—let’s call it the Reds Way—in an Opening Day interview with Mo Egger and WLW:
“I think we’re doing the best we can do with the resources that we have. We’re no more pleased with the results than the fans. I’m not sitting here saying anybody should be happy, I’m not sitting here polishing any trophies in the office right now. And, that’s what we’re here to do. But, the bottom line is I do think we’ve had to shift the discipline, we’ve tried a lot of things that didn’t work. They came this close to working and didn’t, nobody’s gotta tell me they didn’t work. So, I think we’ve learned from those things. Trust me, Nick is a guy on a mission. And he is a bull in a china shop that has his way to do it and that way is to grow your own and he’s doing just that.”
The paint-by-numbers approach ownership laid out before us that day, with the job of follow-through handed over to Nick Krall for execution and eventually, of course, blame, should he fail to thread every needle on a spartan payroll, was revealed. That outline is pretty black and white when one focuses on the obvious phrases in Castellini’s remarks above.
“The Resources We Have” remark from that Opening Day treatise was a late Christmas present to those attending that infamous Rosie Luncheon the following January, just to drive the point home, lest had we forgotten; a bleak, almost Dickensian soliloquy on the state of the Reds, a “Marley was dead” message, only this was the Reds Phil was burying, out of contention before the season had even begun. Ownership, shackled to a poor local TV contract, dragging empty money boxes courtesy of the inconsistent turning of the turnstiles, and numbers on a ledger that spit out a balance sheet no one sees but PowerPoint dutifully explains.
“We’ve Tried a Lot of Things that Didn’t Work” surely refers to those past contracts giddily handed out to Mike Moustakas, Nick Castellanos, Shogo Akiyama, Wade Miley, and Pedro Strop—and the less than satisfying return on that collective investment in the end. In hindsight, what we should have known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that absent a league-wide ownership moratorium on free agent contracts to 30+ year-old players resulting in pillow deals that never materialized, meaningful offensive upgrades like Teoscar Hernandez, Pete Alonso, Jurikson Profar and Anthony Santander were never seriously on the Reds’ radar. Hence, you get one year of Austin Hays for $5M.
“That Way is to Grow Your Own” is where the rubber meets the proverbial road. It means, as you already know, dear reader, betting on drafting and development; making hay during a player’s six years of team control, restocking the farm by trading those players when arbitration in year 5 or 6 makes them outside available “resources” or the demands of a certain player agent (you know who).
The bumpers on the bowling alley gutters were installed to eliminate big money mistakes and instead bet on the faith and ability to successfully proceed down the conservative, small market middle. With significant free agent money off limits and a “grow your own” mandate making cashing in prospects in trade a non-starter, Nick Krall’s lane consists largely of shuffling players on the 26-man roster in order to improve the team. And that’s how you get Jonathan India and Fernando Cruz on a Greyhound out of town for Brady Singer and Jose Trevino.
It’s a Sisyphean task, one that Phil Castellini embellished in an interview just the other day with WLWT, saddling Krall with the responsibility for finding a way to address a contract extension down the road with Elly De La Cruz, knowing full well that would just be the opposite of his “Shifting the Discipline” edict, leaving the GM to deal with the harsh reality that awaits him. Shifting the Discipline is looking suspiciously like the first salvo in shifting the blame.
Now, if we are paying attention, we can clearly see why imploring Krall to find a way to bring Luis Robert Jr to the ballpark down by the river is a head-on collision between the “grow your own” mandate the Reds are now embarking upon and a desperately broken White Sox organization’s asking price. Adding in Robert’s inability to stay on the field (he has played 100 games twice in his career) should send shivers down the spine of any Reds fan who watched the promise of 2023 dissolve into the ‘broken down on the side of the road’ season of 2024. Sending off three or four of your top prospects—one or more of them likely pitchers—for a player who very well might spend half the season on the couch streaming episodes of Ted Lasso is not what the new skipper had in mind when he accepted the job. But as Ted preached, believe.
Francona came to the Queen City, not because he mistook Bob Castellini for Butch Cassidy—blowing the doors off a downtown Fifth Third bank safe—rather, he saw the potential of the this Reds pitching staff, with more help on the way in the form of the Chase boys, Burns and Petty. He wants another opportunity to do what the Guardians have done—dominate with pitching in a very winnable division. He sees the Cardinals in rebuild mode, and Bob Nutting, Mark Attanasio, and Tom Ricketts unlikely to go all Stevie Cohen on the rest of the NL Central and thinks, “I’m familiar with the blueprint for doing that.”
This is the point where you might be told that doing more with less is certainly doable; and this usually is where the Tampa Bay Rays enter the conversation. Lately, it’s been the Cleveland Guardians that’s been hauled out front and center as Exhibit A for why this new Reds Way can work. And it’s certainly true that if the stars all align, the team remains relatively healthy, the division is weak, and enough one run games go your way, a cash deficient team can find its way along the calendar to October. But, there’s almost always a lot of unseen development work that goes on behind the scenes, work that takes time, sometimes years, not to mention the luck that goes into drafting prospects and keeping them healthy.
Money mitigates a lot of that uncertainty.
Sadly, discussions about money, television contracts, how much is being pocketed, whether minority owners should pony up more, the reported Forbes value of the franchise if sold tomorrow—has become exhausting around these parts. Whether ownership can or cannot spend is irrelevant. The point is, for whatever reason, they simply don’t. And contrary to what most of us would like to see happen, they aren’t selling the team. (Talk amongst yourselves.)
Lou Anarumo was celebrated in this town not long ago. Weeks ago, the Bengals fired him because he couldn’t do more with less, the same way the Reds celebrated David Bell with a new contract, then turned heel and pushed him out of the dugout because he couldn’t make do with less. The new defensive coordinator down at PayMore stadium is being hailed as a coach who will bring leadership to the defensive side of the ball the same way Francona has been proclaimed the leader the Reds need, trumpeted recently by Tommy Thrall, who claimed the hiring of Francona to be the equivalent of acquiring “a 10 win player.” You know, Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge. Okay then.
All of which makes one wonder if the Francona hire has given ownership just another excuse to keep the purse strings tight. Tito will fix everything, right? For his part, Krall has done everything that can be expected of him with little more than the few magic beans ownership thinks it has given him. With the acquisition of Gavin Lux, Austin Hays, Alex Young, Wade Miley and Taylor Rogers, this is what Phil was referring to with his “guy on a mission” declaration. If not exactly the moves of a “bull in a china shop,” maybe more like a fox in the hen house?
It’s not what we wanted this winter, but it’s something to hang your Reds bucket hat on. So, we continue to beat on, bunts against the shift, as the broken dreams of Luis Roberts Jr once danced like sugar plums in our heads.
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