Reds Trade Everybody, BRING ON BENGALS

[CJD]

(08-04-2022, 09:34 AM)bengalfan74 Wrote: One of the things that's so frustrating to us old, long time Reds fans is they're on their 27th rebuild since the 90 wire to wire season. They have a total of like 8 winning seasons (if you throw out the shortened seasons) since 90. And their 3 or 4 brushes with the post season in those 30+ seasons have ended with the Reds getting their mouths mashed in a hot hurry. They're in the Bengals area of long time irrelevance.

And I think a lot of fans are more frustrated here lately because it seemed they were trying to finally push over the top. Bauer, Moustakas, Castellonos, Miley and so on. They had Suarez, Senzel, Votto played way over his head. And then - rug jerked out from under all hope again.

I enjoyed the 2020 and 2021 seasons, but that "rebuild," if you want to call it that, always felt like a short term thing to me. We signed Castellanos to an under market deal (especially after his 2021 season) with multiple opt out opportunities (one of which he ultimately took) and we signed Moose to an over market deal to give us that extra juice to push to the playoffs. We traded a chunk of our farm system for 1 1/2 years (only 21 starts!) of Trevor Bauer (Kind of similar to what the Mariners did with Castillo) who we knew we weren't going to sign long term because he made it very clear early on in his career that he never wanted to sign a long term contract.

Going into the 2021 season, it felt like if we didn't make a World Series run, then the whole team would fall apart because it was not constructed with prospects under team control, it was constructed with fairly expensive veterans on expiring contracts, many of whom would soon expect a large raise (Castillo, Winker, Miley, Mahle and Gray were all free agents after 2022 or 2023 with Lorenzen, Disco, and Castellanos being free agents that we would have had to re-sign to big contracts and Bauer having left after 2020). When we failed to even make the playoffs in 2021 with all of those contracts looming large, the team had to make a decision:

Do you keep/re-sign these players for 1 more season (2022) to see if they can put it all together and make a run for the playoffs?

Or do you sell them when they still have an additional year of control left and get an actual return of prospects? You can see in the Castillo trade how valuable that additional year of control is in terms of what you get back for a player.

They chose the latter and got a TON of hate for it. I'm not going to lie, I was upset as well. It felt like they were giving up before they even tried. But now, after seeing what that extra year of control meant in terms of the return we got for Castillo and Mahle, I actually think they made the right decision to blow it all up.

The 2021 team, with the NL rookie of the year at second, Castellanos having a career year (which he has, emphatically, not reproduced this year in Philly), Winker actually staying healthy for a season (2 of his first 3 years, he was unable to stay on the field for more than 89 games) and living up to his potential as a .300 hitter, and Joey Votto having a resurgent year (3.3 WAR in 2021, the highest he's had since 2018) and we STILL didn't even make the playoffs, let alone go on a run in the playoffs. 

In retrospect, it would have been a mistake to push the chips into the middle of the table in one last hurrah to see if we could sneak into the playoffs. This was a very flawed team even before the trades, with Votto and Moose single handedly taking up over a third of the payroll while producing essentially nothing, it was going to be very difficult to go on a run in the playoffs.

If we did, we may be on the brink of the playoffs right now, which would be fun, but then we'd likely either narrowly miss the playoffs or get in, but get bounced by a true contender in the first round of the playoffs. Then, we'd be looking at trading Winker, Sonny, Castillo and Mahle all as rentals rather than players with an additional year of control. And we've seen what a difference that makes in prospects. 

Long story short, I think we're in a much better position right now than we would have been had we tried to make a run this season. All the veterans on expiring contracts have been converted into quality prospects and that feeling of the clock ticking and making the playoffs being a do or die scenario is gone (for now). 

We're building long term for the first time in at least 10 years (after so many failed trades where we held onto players too long, like Cueto, Frazier, Chapman, etc) and what they're setting up for is 4 to 5 years of realistic competition for the playoffs built around prospects that will be under team control for 6 full years (for the players in the minors. It'll be 5 years for Greene, Lodolo and Ashcraft and 4 years for Stephenson and India).