It is extra delicious that the Reds being good also means Phil Castellini is wrong
Last year, the Cincinnati Reds lost 100 games. At that point, a decade had passed since they’d won a single postseason game and more than a quarter of a century since they’d won a postseason series. Still, nearly 1.4 million fans showed up anyway, hoping to catch one of the 62 wins or see something that inspired a glimmer of hope or just to root for their guys, against all odds. Even on the last day of the season, when hope was extinguished and the odds were settled against them and the Reds were 31 games back in the division, 12,437 people spent the afternoon watching their team fall 15-2 to another sub-.500 club.
Because — in a maddening instance of billionaires being on to something, not because they’re especially astute but because the unfairness of the world tilts in their favor — where were they gonna go?
The fear was that this past winter made them only worse. The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans gave their offseason a C+ — and only that high because “not much was expected from the Reds” and because “the charge for GM Nick Krall was to cut payroll, and those moves achieved that goal without a huge drop-off in production.” ESPN was less generous, giving the Reds an F and lamenting that even writing about them is “no fun.”
Just before the season got underway, Fangraphs projected that the Reds would finish last in the National League Central. So did PECOTA. The analysis generally went a little something like this: even in the jugger-not of the NL Central, the Reds’ refusal to try at all from an ownership perspective made so much as contending look far-fetched.
Fortunately, the often cyclical nature of baseball rewards loyalty even if team owners see it as something to be mocked or leveraged. And now, as the baseball calendar hurdles toward the All-Star break, the Cincinnati Reds have ridden a nine-games-and-counting win streak to the top of the division and even the projection systems have to admit, they have a real shot — which is to say a 15.9% shot — of making the playoffs. Plus, they’ve been super fun, too.
The 2023 Reds are the perfect example of the old baseball adage: This is why they play the games. And the slightly less well known one: This is why you don’t make a PowerPoint presentation at a fan luncheon decrying your team’s chances before the season even starts while trying to drum up sympathy (or something?) by blaming the system for why your fans shouldn’t even bother getting excited.
Not quite a year after his 2022 Opening Day comments telling fans to “be careful what you ask for” (that is: a competitive roster) lest he take the team away from them, Reds president Phil Castellini, the son of team owner Bob Castellini, gave a strange talk in January basically bemoaning how baseball is a bad business. (Or maybe that he is bad at the business of baseball, but I digress.) To bolster his point that parity is impossible, he presented a graph tracking the number of teams already out of contention at the start of the season. Including, naturally, his Reds.
Even setting aside the irony of that complaint coming from the guy with direct access to the purse strings, it misunderstands the purpose of a baseball team, which is to delight the people who consciously cultivate a parasocial relationship to it.
Because they are young and dynamic — leading MLB in value added by their baserunning — and because Elly De La is a living highlight reel with hype man confidence and Joey Votto is so easy to cheer for and finally back to giving fans reason to, the current iteration of the Reds are an especially enjoyable surprise. Far from being a failure, in the assignment of providing entertainment on a game- and season-long level, the Reds are acing 2023 so far.
It is extra delicious that the Reds being good also means Castellini is wrong. Because he seems kind of smug and because that serves a helpful reminder that for all MLB team owners can and do control, the players still get the final say. But he is hardly the only person in the sport’s ecosystem to choose cynicism over optimism or to engage in a version of realism that looks an awful lot like cynicism.
We’ve never been better at knowing ahead of time which baseball teams have the capacity to contend based on their constituent parts. That knowing is a natural byproduct of the kind of analysis that underpins plenty of fans’ interest in the game. Baseball begs to be understood, quantified, calculated and ultimately extrapolated. It would have been baselessly pollyannaish to predict the Reds were a likely postseason team. But their current run of success — even if it proves premature, the sign of burgeoning highs to come rather than their actual early arrival — demonstrates the value of going into a baseball season open to delight, even if you don’t expect it.
The worst part about franchise owners is that their own lack of hope can become a self-fulling set of financial limitations. The more accurate projections become, the more likely owners of teams predicted to be on the outside of the postseason picture are to not bother splurging on payroll. It’s not tanking, per se, so much as risk-averse investing and the reality of a closed system. (And the way we talk about underperforming expensive teams as the ultimate embarrassment doesn’t help!) Castellini could have given his front office the financial flexibility to build a team worth getting excited about in the offseason. Instead, he opted to squelch any enthusiasm from fans in service of indulging his own annoyance at the billionaires in bigger markets.
But club owners are a necessary nuisance from a fan perspective. Remember, they need you at least as much as you need them. Because the 278,527 Reds fans who have shown up to watch this win streak in person are doing more to encourage the team to keep it going than anything the owner could say. Castellini is just lucky they’re still there.
