CINCINNATI — In an article published yesterday, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that rival Major League Baseball owners believe the Cincinnati Reds could be next in line for new ownership.
"Rival owners predict that the Cincinnati Reds could be the next MLB team sold. Certainly, Bob Castellini will make a cool profit if he does put them on the block, purchasing the francise for $270 million in 2006. It's now worth about $1.6 billion," Nightengal wrote.
The Castellini family purchased its majority stake in the Reds in January 2006. It’s been more than 20 years since. Twenty years, man. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
During the Castellini era, the Reds have posted a regular-season winning percentage of roughly .477. They’ve reached the postseason five times, with two of those appearances coming after division championships. They have never won a playoff series. Never.
Two division titles and zero playoff series wins. Zero-for-history—and we give Ke’Bryan Hayes grief for his batting average. Ke’Bryan is the second coming of Babe Ruth compared to the Castellinis’ success rate.
If I could make a pitch to the Reds’ ownership group, it would go something like this:
Please, Castellini family. Sell the team.
You guys are going to get a very, very nice bag of cash for selling the Reds. Just take it. As the song says, take the money and run. Far away and over the hills. Or [insert your favorite applicable song here].
After all, it’ll help you sell more fruit if you reinvest some of that windfall. Imagine all the jobs you could create.
You guys are awesome at fruit. Major League Baseball? Not so much. Stick with what you know. Stick with what you’re good at. There’s no reason to prove the Peter Principle correct every time we turn on the television or visit Great American Ball Park.
And Bob, there’s no reason to have Phil continue embarrassing this otherwise fine franchise every time he opens his maw to discuss the state of affairs. Save him, save yourself and, most importantly, save all of us. Please.
And Phil, dude, if you’re worried about where we—the fans—are going to go if you and Daddy sell, don’t be. We’ll go to more Reds games because the product will be better than yours, that’s where. We’ll go watch a winner.
Put down the yoke, Phil! Let someone else work through this seemingly unsolvable problem of how to win at baseball. Stick to fruit, bro. You’re, like, totally awesome at it and stuff.
Once both of you recognize and fully embrace your fruit skill set—your fruitness, if you will—and finally see where you should have been all along, please sell. As soon as you can.
If you do, we’ll all agree to buy one fruit basket from you. Promise. That should help you get back into the swing of things, fruit-wise.
And you know what? I’ll bet you dollars to dragon fruit that Nick Krall would make an absolutely amazing traveling fruit salesperson. Grounds crew to salesperson is a logical rise through the ranks. Grounds crew to general manager is not.
So, you sell and get a big bag of cash. The city wins because you can now create hundreds of jobs for the community with your extra almost half billion dollars. And we little fans get to finally have somewhere to go that is worthy of our time and attention.
Win-win-win!
See, there is a solution to this Reds team after all.
