Enquirer sports columnist Jason Williams recently let out a cry heard all across Redsland:
"Sell the team."
Everyone understood what he meant.
Bob Castellini has had his turn at bat. When his ownership group bought the Reds in 2006, Castellini promised, "We will bring championship baseball to Cincinnati."
Twenty-one seasons later, the Reds have had 14 losing seasons and five postseason appearances without winning a playoff series. With the White Sox recently winning their Wild Card Series, Cincinnati is now the only Major League Baseball team that has failed to win a postseason series since Castellini took over.
Castellini came to the plate promising championship baseball.
He struck
out.
So it is easy to understand the reaction: Give somebody else a turn.
But there are two assumptions buried inside "sell the team" that deserve a closer look.
Castellini knew produce. The Reds bought too many lemons
The first is that the next rich man will be better at running a baseball team.
Successful people tend to believe that the judgment and skills that made them successful in one business will transfer to another. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.
Castellini knew the produce business. He knew how to buy produce, ripen it, distribute it and sell it. None of that teaches you how to identify a 17-year-old pitcher in the Dominican Republic, determine whether a college shortstop can hit major-league pitching, or build a player-development system.
Buying and ripening produce and identifying and developing baseball players require very different skills. Perhaps they have only one thing in common.
If you buy too many lemons, you are going to lose.
A new owner might run the Reds much better. He might hire better baseball people, draft and develop more successfully and make smarter decisions. That is the strongest argument for different ownership.
But there is a second assumption behind "sell the team," and it is more difficult.
Finding Cincinnati's Steve Cohen won't be easy
Who is going to buy it?
The fantasy seems to be that somewhere there is a billionaire who loves Cincinnati and its sports fans so much that he will buy the Reds and spend his own money year after year to overcome the economic disadvantage of playing in one of baseball’s smaller markets.
In other words, we are looking for Cincinnati’s Steve Cohen.
Cohen, the billionaire owner of the New York Mets, has demonstrated a willingness to carry payrolls well above $300 million and absorb enormous luxury-tax bills in pursuit of a championship.
Maybe Cincinnati can find someone like that.
But sorry, this ain’t New York.
Cohen bought the Mets in America’s largest media market. The Reds play in Cincinnati.
That does not mean Cincinnati cannot win. Small-market teams can draft better, develop better players and outsmart clubs with much larger payrolls.
Those are precisely the things the Castellini ownership has too often failed to do.
And for a small-market team, those failures matter more because there is less money available to correct them.
Major League Baseball itself now argues that the economic structure is a problem. MLB says the gap between its highest- and lowest-spending teams has grown to more than $400 million. Its proposal for the next labor agreement includes a salary cap, a salary floor and greater sharing of local media revenue.
The players dispute whether a salary cap is necessary. But the underlying issue is hard to ignore: Cincinnati does not operate with the same financial margin for error as New York, Los Angeles or other large markets.
That is the reality a new Reds owner inherits.
He can be smarter than the Castellinis. He can hire better people and spend more intelligently. And when the Reds have a legitimate chance to win, he can choose to spend beyond what the Cincinnati market comfortably supports.
But unless he is prepared to do that repeatedly from his personal fortune, there are limits to what a change in ownership alone can accomplish.
Perhaps that owner exists.
Selling the Reds is a transaction, not a solution
Perhaps Bob Castellini should sell the Reds. His ownership group promised championship baseball and has not delivered it.
But “sell the team” is not a solution.
It is a transaction.
The solution is finding an owner who understands baseball better, hires the right people and is willing to spend aggressively when the opportunity to win arrives.
Maybe that billionaire is out there.
If so, let’s find him.
Until then, “sell the team” is a perfectly understandable cry from frustrated Reds fans.
But it is still a cry in the wilderness.
Dennis Doyle lives in Anderson Township and is a member of the Enquirer Board of Contributors.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Bob Castellini should sell the Reds. But then what? | Opinion
