While the headline says what it says and this article comes on the day in which Kyle Schwarber chose to sign with the Philadelphia Phillies, this isn’t exactly about the Reds not signing Schwarber. This is actually about why they were willing to try and sign the 2025 National League leader in home runs and RBI.
Cincinnati reportedly offered Kyle Schwarber a 5-year deal and $125,000,000 with what Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported as “room to grow”, but didn’t specify what that meant exactly. Performance bonuses of some sort, but what those entailed was not clarified. Schwarber would wind up accepting the Phillies deal for five years and for $150,000,000. At the very end of the article, Rosenthal added this:
“Unlike the Orioles, the Reds are not expected to pursue other expensive free agents. Their offer to Schwarber, a native of Middletown, Ohio, about 35 miles north of Cincinnati, was tied to their belief that his addition would help drive ticket sales.”
There is a whole lot in those two sentences to dissect if we assume that it’s the truth. Let’s start with the first part – the Reds aren’t expected to look at other “expensive free agents”. That’s a swift kick in the gut to fans thinking that if Schwarber wasn’t the guy then maybe Pete Alonso could be a good second option for the team to go after to add a middle of the order hitter that they desperately need.
But all of that gets to the second part, which has a million things going on with it. The only reason the Reds were willing to make that offer to Schwarber is because they believe that him being good and from Middletown would sell tickets. And hey, that’s probably true to the tiniest extent. But how many extra tickets are people really going to buy because “he’s from Middletown” versus if he were born in Montana and still hit 56 home runs last year? I’d venture to guess that it’s not enough extra tickets to pay one league minimum salary.
But what I really took away from that part of the quote is that someone high up, and maybe even the guy at the top of the front office, does not think that fans will buy tickets simply because the team wins a bunch of baseball games. The fact that they would be willing to spend money on Kyle Schwarber being based on selling more tickets, but not willing to spend the money on other “expensive free agents”, who would seemingly also help the team win more baseball games because otherwise they wouldn’t be “expensive free agents” tells us what we need to know. They want you to support a bad product before trying to use your money to make it a better product instead of them spending money to make a good product that you then want to buy (tickets, merchandise, watch, listen, etc).
Someone is making that statement. And if you’re a fan of the team it can’t leave you with all that good of a feeling knowing that the people in charge don’t think you will support a winner enough for them to “risk” money on trying to do it, but they do think you will support a hometown guy.
Which, of course, makes sense because that’s how this ownership group seems to run the entire organization. They hire local people and people they know.
When this ownership group took over one of the first things they did was fire the general manager. It wasn’t long before they moved on from the next guy, too, and brought in Walt Jocketty who had been the GM with the Cardinals with Bob Castellini was a minority owner with St. Louis. Under Jocketty, the team had their best run of success in the last two decade and provided the team with their only three seasons in the last 25 years that resulted in more than 83 wins.
When Jocketty was promoted to the president of baseball operations the team promoted Dick Williams, the son and nephew of two of the ownership group members, to GM. He later took over as the team’s president of baseball operations and Nick Krall, who had been with the organization since 2002, became the new GM. When Krall took over as the president of baseball operations when Williams stepped down, the Reds promoted Brad Meador to GM. Meador joined the Reds organization in 2009 after being an assistant baseball coach at the University of Cincinnati.
Lower positions in the front office have also similarly been very much “friends and family” or Cincinnati type connected, too. Multiple farm directors went to the same small college – Haverford. The assistant GM has been with the Reds organization since 2007. The director of amateur scouting (the guy who runs the draft) has been with the organization since 2004 when he was an intern after graduating college. The assistant director of amateur scouting just completed his 28th season with Cincinnati.
Now, while it is certainly possible that after doing tons of interviews and reviewing the qualifications for everyone that all of these guys were truly the best hires for the jobs. But it’s incredibly unlikely. There’s just a lot of “small town local business” vibes to who gets hired to run a billion dollar business with the Reds. Nearly everyone has been with them for 20 years or has a connection to the city, or both. It would be one thing if those 20-something years saw them running a dynasty. But as noted above, they’ve topped 83 wins in a season three times in the last 25 years.
Winning seems to be second fiddle to so many other things. And if the ownership group/front office/whoever doesn’t believe that winning is going to bring enough ticket sales in to make it “worth while” then it’s hard to see how or why they would ever truly try to take any real risk in trying to win. There’s probably a lot of people one can point fingers at for all of this. It starts at the ownership who states they try to break even every year and won’t invest money into the team beyond what the revenue was the year before. But Bob Castellini isn’t likely deciding on who the farm director is, or who is running the draft – those decisions are being made by people below him in the organization (which he likely did have say in hiring/promoting). The culture, wherever it has come from, just doesn’t inspire tons of confidence.
All of that to say that there’s no reason to believe that once you get below the ownership group that everyone isn’t trying to do the best that they can to turn the Cincinnati Reds into a winning organization. Nick Krall and Brad Meador aren’t sabotaging the team. Terry Francona isn’t making moves to lessen the chances the Reds win. The players surely aren’t just out there going through the motions. But once you get beyond the guys that step between the lines, nearly everyone above them has been around for a long, long time and working for a franchise that simply put – has been terrible for most of the last two decades, which also coincides directly with the amount of time that the current ownership group has been in place.
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