Cincinnati Reds fans have told the Castellini ownership group where to go ever since Phil Castellini uttered the most infamous words of his executive career four and a half years ago.
Now we know where they’re gonna go.
“We’re here. We’re gonna be here,” the team president and CEO said Oct. 1 during a rare sitdown with Reds media.
Castellini, who in the past year assumed the role of primary ownership representative from his father, Bob, said the group has no intention of selling the Reds anytime soon despite 21 seasons of mostly failed baseball, and despite a constant drumbeat of fans pleading for them to sell.
“We haven’t accomplished what we set out to accomplish. There’s more work to be done,” Phil Castellini said. “We respect and understand
the importance of this franchise to this city. We respect our fans. They are incredibly baseball-high-IQ fans. I think they deserve better.
“And I think this group of people has the capability to deliver what they deserve, and we want to continue until we do.”
That this is the right group to deliver a championship is at least debatable. The only empirical evidence suggests the opposite, including 14 losing seasons in the 21 years of ownership and zero playoff series wins.
“That’s not lost on us,” said Castellini, who promised a more thorough “deep dive” audit of the team’s organizational practices and personnel than the typical annual evaluation following what some have described as the most disappointing season for the club in decades.
“I didn’t say it was easy,” he said. ”But it doesn’t mean you should lower the expectation of the fans or our organization to achieve those goals.”
As MLB heads into an offseason fraught with what already looks like the most combative labor negotiations since the 1994-95 shutdown, the Reds have a team that failed to compete in every facet of the game this year and little promise of the means and opportunity to fix it anytime soon.
Castellini praised the overall shift in strategy the team made in 2021-22 when it traded veterans, brought in a wave of younger players and put more emphasis on drafting, international scouting and player development.
In particular, he pledged “100 percent” faith in team president Nick Krall and general manager Brad Meador as effective and important leaders of the baseball operations side in “taking this thing to the next level and solving the challenges that we have.”
But 21 years of competitive quality ranging from mediocrity to lousy?
What makes Castellini believe this ownership group is the right group to spend another decade fixing the last two?
“We have a commitment to this city. I’m a fourth-generation Cincinnati guy,” he said. “We are passionate about this community and improving this community, and we respect and understand the value of what the professional sports in this city bring to this city. That delivery − or failure to deliver − is not lost on us. And we’re gonna continue to work harder until we do.”
With no thought of selling.
“This isn’t about investing in something to do a flip," he said. "This is about getting it right in the community for the community, by a leadership and ownership group that is predominantly from and live in this community.”
What about the successive MLB-record prices for franchise this summer when the San Diego Padres ($3.9 billion) and Los Angeles Angels ($4 billion) were sold?
The buzz within the industry − outside of Cincinnati − was that the Reds might be next.
“That’s not why we were here,” Castellini said. “That’s not why we ever got involved in the team.
“It is a business. But for us, it’s a stewardship of a community asset. And we still have a commitment to that community to deliver. And we’re not done with that.
“So, there’s really just no focus at all on the selling of this team. It’s about getting it right and giving our fans the product on the field that they deserve. … We haven’t done that, and that’s where our focus is.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Why Phil Castellini says owning Reds is a 'commitment to this city'
