You’ve probably already seen the news that the Cincinnati Reds have decided to fire manager David Bell with less than a week to go in his 6th season while still having two years remaining on his contract. That news broke last night and this morning the club held a press conference where President of Baseball Operations Nick Krall spoke with the assembled media.
I’ve uploaded the entire press conference so you can see everything that was asked and exactly what the answers were.
There were a few quotes, though, that stood out to me and we’re going to highlight those.
“We made the decision to extend David last season because I thought we were moving in the right direction as we promoted a younger core of players to develop in the big leagues. But after reflecting on everything from this season I decided that we needed to move in another direction with the leadership in the major league clubhouse.”
Shortly before that, Krall said this: “Over the last few years he was the right person for this job.”
What changed from he was the right person for the job to we need to move in another direction with the leadership in the clubhouse? While there were some new players from the point of late July last year when he was given an extension to today, there weren’t many of them. How did his leadership change from the first five years to the sixth year that was so drastically “wrong” that it meant firing him was the right move?
“We want to make sure that we’re making better decisions, players are making better decisions, players are moving forward and getting better and continuously getting better at this level, I think that’s extremely important as we have a young group.”
Getting better at this level. You’ve got a mixed bag here. Elly De La Cruz is the 3rd most valuable player in the National League right now according to Fangraphs version of WAR. Hunter Greene is currently 10th in the NL in pitchers WAR and he missed six weeks with injury. Those both feel like clear and important “getting better at this level”. Both guys have put up “these are franchise cornerstone” types of seasons. Tyler Stephenson hasn’t been as good as either of those guys, but he’s taken a step forward this year, too.
On the flip side of that you’ve got Will Benson making a big regression. Noelvi Marte’s sample size was small in 2023, but he played well, and this year he’s been bad. Matt McLain was hurt all year. Christian Encarnacion-Strand didn’t hit at all, but who knows if he was ever actually healthy this season after the debacle that wound up being the diagnosis of his injured wrist. The rotation didn’t exactly remain healthy, but the club is keeping Derek Johnson around who is both the pitching coach and the director of pitching – so it’s tough to put the blame on Bell for that side of things.
“There were some philosophical differences in where we were and we’ve just evaluated things, specifically over the last couple months that we felt we needed to make a change.”
Krall was unwilling to say what those differences were “for now”. A follow up question did lead him to note that the team had been thrown out on the bases a lot and they did some things that were undisciplined.
Another follow up to that was asking how you go 14 months ago with a contract extension to now not being the guy. And essentially it was that Krall felt some players took steps backwards this season.
How the philosophical differences didn’t exist 14 months ago after watching him manage for nearly five years changed that much remains a rather large and unanswered question.
It’s also worth noting, too, that along with David Bell being let go, that game planning/infield coach Jeff Pickler was also fired. The rest of the coaching staff remains for now.
You can read our piece on the firing from last night right here.
The post Watch: Nick Krall speaks on the firing of Reds manager David Bell appeared first on Redleg Nation.