Fascinating interview with Bob C on their website a couple of days ago. Was easy to see just how clueless he is. Now I wish I had not read it because it soured me worse when I was hoping to keep an open mind. Rant time.
He states the obvious - 29th in market size. Well, yeah, since MLB began, Bob. He's also about that range or worse in net worth supporting the club. So, he and the ownership group do not have the reserves to fix anything short or long term. They hope to catch lightning in a bottle for a season every decade or two is about it.
So that equates to managing payroll because the COVID year hurt them financially. Well, yeah, Bob. It did with every team in MLB. It's not about paying more, you can stay the same. You have to absorb the revenue losses just like every org did to stay competitive. But you are not doing that. You are paying less after the market has returned to recoup your past losses at the probable expense of team performance, which cause the club to draw less fans and less revenue. Duh. Now do you understand why fans are pizzed and ragging your arse? Cincy Reds' fans understand the game.
Regardless of all that, it's about signing and retaining players who are good at what they do. He talks about how the farm is now in the top 10 in talent and how they will be using it to restock in the future. Since when? They leave them in the minors forever and use up over half of their contract time and most productive years getting them MLB ready. By the time they get there they are so fed up with the org they leave as soon as they can.
The mishandling of Senzel is a classic example. Instead of fast tracking him at his natural position of 3B, they convert him to 2B, only to reconvert him to CF. Along the way he gets injured, when he arrives he gets injured. All of it on defense in the field, because he is not playing his natural position that they drafted him to play as the #2 pick in the draft. Meanwhile they change his stance and approach at the plate - in the middle of the season. Now they let him go back to how he did it before. Bob doesn't get any of that, so he allows the org to do that type stuff with all of the players they bring in. Had they handled Senzel correctly, Suarez would have been moved for a bundle of talent when he was at peak performance since the team was not going anywhere anyway. Now they have an aging piece of glass at 3B they overpaid, having converted the next best 3B player in India to 2B and they are still waiting on Senzel to emerge as a quality player. They lucked up on India because they did not believe when they brought him to camp last season that he was ready and he proved them to be the idiots they are.
It's the Cincinnati way as long as Bob and the boys own the team. He just let 4 former all star starting position players walk - Castellanos, Tucker, Wink and Geno - to manage payroll. Decimated the pen even worse than it already was and lost two quality starters. But he wants to reassure fans that they are committed to winning baseball games. Trust us, he says, while bringing in everybody else's castoffs to hold tryouts in a 3-week spring training.
You would think I was making all of this up.
