This Reds season has been some kind of ride, huh? Oh? What do you mean, "It's time to get off?" You mean the ride doesn't work? You mean it's never worked?
Maybe we just got on the wrong ride. Maybe we thought we were on the ride to the pennant race, even the playoffs, and we accidentally boarded this ride to the All-Star break.
You mean there was no ride to the pennant race? Oh, this is the ride to 2003! Didn't we get off this ride, like, 18 months ago?
Not if you listen to the Reds. They won 96 games in 1999, nearly made the playoffs, then added Ken Griffey Jr. for 2000, driving up ticket sales and creating the hardest baseball buzz in town since the late 1970s. All this time, though, they've been rebuilding for 2003.
The Reds were in first place on June 4. But they were rebuilding for 2003. So when they tanked for two weeks, losing 11 of 12 from June 5 through June 18, it wasn't just a blip on the screen -- it was part of the plan.
Evidently, they've never been serious about winning this year. We just thought they were.
So, did the Reds ever think they were serious about winning this year? Throughout spring training, while the newly reformed Reds nation took up arms for a pennant campaign, General Manager Jim Bowden consistently said, "We'll go as far as our pitching takes us."
That turned out to be partly true, for not only did the pitching not take the Reds very far, but Bowden didn't allow the pitching to take them as far as it could have. On July 12, the day after the All-Star Game, Bowden bartered left hander Denny Neagle, their ace, to the New York Yankees for four prospects -- pitchers Ed Yarnall and Brian Reith, outfielder Jackson Melian and third baseman Drew Henson, more famously the quarterback at the University of Michigan.
So ends the misconception that the Reds were going to be good this year. But the misconception and its confuting are of some value -- even if not worth the price of a ticket you've bought for a future game -- because they raise a couple instructive questions:
1. How does a professional baseball operation go from first place with record ticket sales and one of the most potent batting orders in the game on June 4 to re-emphasizing its rebuilding project at the All-Star break?
2. What are the sources of the misconception that the Reds had something in mind for 2000 other than rebuilding?
On the first question, it remains to this day that the Reds are in the wild-card hunt and, with Neagle, could have been a serious contender. At the break, the Reds were 5 1/2 games behind the New York Mets for wild-card position, which posed the feasible challenge of passing the Mets, Colorado Rockies, San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, Florida Marlins and Montreal Expos. In the first three days after the break, the Reds passed the Dodgers and Expos while pulling even with the Rockies and Marlins.
The Reds could have looked to the rest of their schedule, which offered plenty of opportunity to make up ground against losing clubs and other wild-card contenders. They could have looked for the return to life of their underperforming offense. They could have stabilized. Could have.
For all that has gone awry with the Reds this season, the fact remains that they've been truly bad for only those two weeks in June. A serious baseball operation blows off that kind of slump like a cold.
But the additional fact remains that much has gone awry for the Reds this season, and it's safe to say the baseball braintrust isn't confident this club had the character to climb through the standings, let alone survive for long in the playoffs.
If you're Jack McKeon, you wonder about the character of your players, because they're trying to get you fired. McKeon certainly doesn't have reason to question if he's at the top of his game. Just last season, he was Manager of the Year. Now, players are staging a mutiny.
Both Bowden and first base coach Dave Collins have gone on record in the afternoon paper denouncing the negative approach taken by players, and this surely is an unsavory state of affairs. It's tough to succeed in baseball, and poor performances here and there are part of the game. But when you can't even assume your players are taking the right approach, you're about finished.
Said Bowden to Andy Furman, in the latter's print capacity: "We should all look at ourselves in the mirror. We've failed from the general manager on down."
Along with calling some of the players "babies," Collins said, "Jack's got to deal with guys who have their own agenda. Some coaches seem to want the manager's job, too."
Baseball clubs often go into the tank after just this fashion, which is why, by the way, the Yankees are so much more than just the sum of their paychecks.
In one year, like 1999 for the Reds, everything comes together unexpectedly because players have been humbled by failure. So they're willing to put their personal interests aside, work assiduously to improve and accept less glamorous roles for the sake of the team. The club wins, everybody cares primarily about the team and a certain magic fills the air.
But success often breeds a lack of grounding, and so players come back the following year and say, essentially, "OK, I gave up mine for the team last year. Now, I'm going to get mine."
Some simply struggle with adjustments. Others, perhaps, haven't worked hard enough to maintain peak performance. Still others, inevitably, aren't as good in the long run as when they were caught up in the magic of the previous year. So the whole operation collapses. We witnessed a similar phenomenon in the transition from the Reds' 1990 World Championship to fifth place in 1991.
On the scoreboard and in the standings, the Reds haven't done so badly that they should give up on the season if they believed the club had the character and cohesion to make a run for the World Championship worthwhile. But the Reds' braintrust obviously sees too much it doesn't like about this ball club to stock it with resources for which it would have to borrow against the future.
And so, in this climate, no one argues to Carl Lindner or his aides that giving up on the 2000 season, folding up just when the going gets tough, reveals the absence of the fighting, competitive disposition that's the sine qua non of the baseball business. That's already out the window.
No one is going to argue that it's worth the risk to wage the uphill battle toward the playoffs, not just for the sake of the good fight but because waving the white flag is a betrayal of the fans to whom the Reds promised at least playoff contention. No one is going to make these arguments, because no one believes them. Indeed, the Reds went in just the opposite direction, selling off part of a present it deems lost with hopes of a better ball club in the future.
As to the second question -- the sources of the misconception that the Reds had something in mind for 2000 other than rebuilding -- we need to go back in time. During the offseason between 1998 and 1999, the Reds were up for sale, as Major League Baseball prevailed upon Marge Schott to divest her controlling interest. The Reds, at that point, were a rather uninspiring lot, two years into a youth movement aimed at a new ballpark whose site hadn't even been officially decided.
A small-market club in a big-market game, the Reds were of little interest to buyers of any sort, be they potential buyers of the club or potential buyers of tickets. The few baseball fans in Cincinnati who cared enough not to ignore the Reds completely were disgusted. The Reds simply had to infuse themselves with some kind of life.
So, Managing Executive John Allen authorized a $10 million payroll increase, with the understanding that Bowden wouldn't thereby compromise the youth movement. And Bowden worked masterfully, dealing players who weren't in the plan -- Bret Boone, Reggie Sanders, Mike Remlinger and Damian Jackson -- to bring in Neagle, Greg Vaughn and a fine prospect, pitcher Rob Bell. With that little expenditure, the Reds not only helped themselves immediately but served the youth movement.
The Reds went off to a sluggish start, but Vaughn proved to be a commanding presence who kicked them into gear. Suddenly, they were off on their magic ride to 96 wins.
At about the same time, Lindner, who'd been a limited partner during the Schott regime, stepped in to buy controlling interest in the club. Lindner's friends and aides have said he wanted nothing to do with owning the ball club and put in his bid only because it appeared otherwise headed into the hands of Clevelander Larry Dolan.
Because Lindner is no friend of the public eye, observers were left to infer his plans for the club from its actions. And right at the trading deadline last July came a sign that the old man might want to live a little with all his wealth and his golden years, as the Reds acquired pitcher Juan Guzman. The trade cost a good prospect, pitcher B.J. Ryan, but the Reds were in first place, the players were all business and, if it were a slight departure from the youth movement, who was going to argue with taking a run at the pennant when it was so close?
It took a while for the fans to catch on, but the Reds were a very hot commodity at the tail end of the season. Following, of course, were the events that shook Cincinnati with unconstrained joy.
Word came out of Seattle during the offseason that Griffey Jr. turned up his nose at an offer of $140 million to remain in Seattle past the 2000 season. Always loving to make a deal and put the Reds into the news, Bowden made no bones about the common belief that bringing Griffey home to Cincinnati and putting him in the middle of the Reds' batting order had a certain natural appeal.
The rest is recent history: Bowden made a trade for Griffey, who signed a nine-year deal for $116.5 million. The telephones in the ticket offices were jammed, there was dancing in the streets and all hailed Lindner and the Reds for increasing their player payroll by 40 percent to around $47 million, which was, surely, a sign that the local ball club was in the hunt for, as the punsters so often put it, Reds October.
Now here we are in mid-July, scratching our heads as the Reds wave the white flag and talk about rebuilding for 2003. What happened?
It's simple. We all figured that, in some sense, the acquisition of Griffey was a sign that Lindner was willing to spend money, within reason, to make the Reds a viable contender. We were wrong. The decision to sign Griffey had everything to do with business -- and if it made the Reds a winner, well, that would have been a nice collateral effect.
Recall that at the end of last season the baseball operation was directed to keep player payroll around its 1999 level of $33 million, since attendance had barely topped 2 million. One doesn't have to live in the Reds offices to know Bowden would love to have brought back Vaughn and his many contributions. But he couldn't afford it. Bowden would love to have brought back Guzman. Couldn't afford that, either.
The only way Bowden hoped to even keep the Reds on their pace was to bring in Griffey, who not only hits home runs but stands as one of the very best drawing cards in the game and could, therefore, at least pay for himself. If the baseball operation could offer Griffey to Lindner as a profitable business proposition, then Griffey could play in Cincinnati. And that's how it's played out, for Griffey, by many estimates, has more than paid for himself.
That taken into consideration, it's not as if Lindner authorized a 40 percent payroll increase at the end of last season so Bowden could improve the club as needed. Griffey's contract is an entirely separate issue. Indeed, when trying to understand what the Reds are doing, it's useful to think of the club not in terms of a $47 million payroll -- it's actually a $37 million payroll for everyone except Griffey and a $10 million payroll for Griffey.
So, if Griffey weren't such an excellent business proposition in and of himself, the Reds would be playing with something like a $35 million payroll. And there would never have been any question that the team was still into a youth movement.
In some respects, then, Griffey isn't so much a member and teammate of the Reds as a wholly owned subsidiary of Cincinnati Reds Ltd. Whether or not his satellite status has a spillover effect in the clubhouse is anyone's guess -- and most would guess it does, somehow, for he was brought in not as part of the plan but as a money-making sideshow.
The larger issue, though, is the direction for the ball club and whether or not Lindner is inclined to bankroll a winner. And it's certain at this point that he's running the Reds for profits, not for pennants. Indeed, befitting a man who runs many businesses, he's running two baseball businesses -- the Reds as one and Griffey as another.
"Woo Hoo!" said the cover of CityBeat when Griffey came to town, "We're all gonna be rich!" And that's really what it's all been about all along.
As to the Reds' next pennant, check back in 2003. It might not be any closer, but we'll have a better idea.
SPORTS is sports, in this space every week. Contact Bill at CityBeat, 23 E. Seventh St., #617, Cincinnati, OH 45202, or e-mail him at letters@citybeat.com
