The empirical data does enough heavy lifting for even the most casual observers to note just how bad the Cincinnati Reds are at the sport of baseball at the moment. They do rank dead last in their division, after all, and a glance at their ghastly -160 run differential this season just hammers that point home.
They’re tied for the worst hitting team in a game where you need to hit. Their 91 wRC+ binds them with their frequent cellarmates from Denver, the Colorado Rockies, in last place there.
Their
pitchers walk more batters per 9 innings than any other club, fueling a FIP that’s better than only one club in the sport. Their xFIP – at 4.79 – is worsted only by those same Rockies, who just wrapped up a fourth straight 100+ loss season.
Defensive metrics are notoriously all over the place, but one – Defensive Runs Saved – tends to stand out as the most telling year over year. The Cincinnati Reds rank dead last in that metric this season with just four more games left to play.
The Cincinnati Reds cannot hit, cannot pitch, and cannot field in a sport where the three things you must do 162 nights a year are hit, pitch, and field. A more perfect recipe for being dead last in one’s division there must not be.
It’s simple to stare at the ends and point out the obvious. This is a bad baseball team that looked bad at the outset, played badly, and is now in a bad, bad place in the standings. More telling, though, is observing the means to which those ends were produced, and for the Reds those means are just as last place as the product itself.
In a rather scathing expose from The Athletic, the disconnect between the Castellini-led ownership group of the Reds and the Nick Krall-led front office could not be laid more bare.
The owners could not be more obvious in their dreams of being successful while simultaneously being more oblivious to their own meddling. The front office, continually stubbing its toes in attempts to persuade the owners into making more practical moves, has been forced to pivot to their second and third backup plans, most all of which have blown up in their faces in spectacular failure. Yet here those factions are, familiar in a Butter Battle Book way, insistent that they be the only two voices that ever get the chance to steer the wheel of this once proud franchise.
Neither seems able to budge. The Castellinis won’t sell, won’t change, and won’t change a thing about the front office that can’t get out of its own way. That has become the Reds way, even though it has tanked any and all interest in the club despite the roster boasting a handful of the single most electric talents in the sport today.
The term dinosaurs often gets lobbed around about individuals who have simply been everpresent for so long they must be decrepit. Dinosaurs also need be used to explain how a whole sect of sentient beings went extinct due to an inability to adapt to the pressures around them, and for the Reds that latter definition rings more true today than perhaps at any point in their century and a half of professional existence.
The Reds are broken, and the only people capable of fixing that simply won’t.
Who’s ready to run it back again in 2027?
