A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I once covered a badly disfunctional Cincinnati Reds baseball team. I can’t call them bad, somehow, despite them barreling into the trade deadline that year with a dismal 46-55 record, and a quick refresh will remind you why.
That club had Joey Votto and Jay Bruce. It had Todd Frazier winning the Home Run Derby. It had a rotation fronted by Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake, and featured Aroldis Chapman at the back of the bullpen. Zack Cozart and Brandon Phillips
manned the middle of the infield, and Anthony DeSclafani began to emerge as a legitimate cog in the rotation. And, of course, there was the streakily brilliant Jay Bruce on the roster, too. Still, that club found themselves in the doldrums of the standings that year, and the late Walt Jocketty – at that point still at the helm of the club in whatever title he held at the time – famously told late Enquirer beat writer John Fay “We’re rebooting or retooling. It’s not a rebuild.“
Fast-forward eleven years, and we’ve got Nick Krall giving us this:
You may recall that the 2015 season, which nosedived to a 64-98 finish, was backed up by a 2016 season that saw them go just 68-94. The 2017 season saw them go 68-94, too, as they botched unloading the players they should have dealt earlier and settled for middling returns, and by 2018 they had found a way to be just the slightest bit worse at 67-95.
That’s what the last reboot/retool produced. Not just a haphazard attempt at trimming off precious little of the current roster for substantial returns down the road, but a hubris that what they’d built to that point actually was going to be good enough if it just had a little bit more time to coalesce. It didn’t, obviously, and by the time they came to the realization that a) it wasn’t going to and b) suddenly everyone was going to be far more expensive than they wanted to afford to give it any more time, nobody had any value left on the trade market at all.
Nick Krall was part of that front office eleven years ago, and he’s at the helm of it himself this time around. This is the process on which he was steeped, and it’s bubbling right back up for us to witness once again. The Reds, who’ve won absolutely nothing at all since the last time we got to sit back and watch this mismanagement, are committed completely to the same ass-dragging slowplay strategy that set them back the last decade.
The lack of creativity is almost as unsettling as the products on the field.
