The Reds front office can never make anything simple

Nick Krall joined Buster Olney on the Baseball Tonight podcast and spent time talking about quite a few topics related to the club. After the first question asked and the answer given by the Cincinnati Reds President of Baseball Operations it left me wondering why this team simply can’t do the simple things and has to try and make things as difficult on themselves as possible.

Olney asked Krall to speak about the trade deadline and what some of the internal conversations were. Krall spoke about how they felt they need bullpen help and outfield help among other things.

Then he goes on to say how they got bullpen help by trading for a starting pitcher and outfield help by trading for a third baseman.

Huh?

Yes, technically the plan to help the bullpen was to move Nick Martinez to the bullpen and out of the rotation. And that plan lasted about a whole week. And yes, also the Reds were able to move Noelvi Marte into the outfield because they moved him from third base by acquiring Ke’Bryan Hayes.

Of course Marte’s been a disaster in the outfield so far – which absolutely is not his fault. He’s being asked to move to a position he’s never played before in the middle of a season. It’s not quite the same thing as moving from shortstop to third or second base, where many of the same things at shortstop can and do translate to the other two spots.

Cincinnati could have simply traded for a reliever and traded for an outfielder. But instead they took a round about way of trying to fill those spots by shopping at the thrift store and finding broken items that maybe they could fix with some spare parts at home if they were willing to put in the man hours to disassemble things and diagnose the problem, and then also hope that in their bin of parts they had the right one to put into their broken gadget and make it work.

The Reds are supposed to be competing for a playoff spot. They needed help right then, not a long term project. Not a fixer upper that with time could turn out well. But they simply can’t help themselves. And it’s something they do over and over.

Instead of trying to find a good player, they try to platoon six guys in the outfield and hope it works out. They continuously play guys out of position because of it. Every so often they will shop at Target instead of the thrift store in free agency, but they show up to the Black Friday sale on the following Thursday and then pick through the scraps but wind up spending the same amount of money on a questionable buy that they could have spent on Friday on a good buy if they had just shown up. But it seems that over and over they try to “wait out” the market and by the time they find the gumption to actually hand over their credit card to purchase something all of the good players in their spending range have long ago signed because other teams were less worried about “overpaying” by 4% of what they felt was a fair price.

The market is the market. But the Reds don’t seem to want to accept that fact, so they refuse to pay market prices whether that’s in trade or in signings. So they try to play Dr. Frankenstein on their roster, but instead of getting Frankenstein’s monster, they wind up with what looks like Sid’s mutant toys from Toy Story.

They – whether that’s the ownership group, the front office employees, or both – need to be direct. They need to stop trying to make a hammer out of a big rock, some string, and a stick, and just go to the hardware store and buy a hammer. It’s going to be more useful. It will be better.