On Wednesday night the Cincinnati Reds Hot Stove League show was live on the air. The guest in the first half of the show was Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall. One of the final things he was asked on the show was about Elly De La Cruz and being moved off of shortstop. After saying no, he wasn’t going to be moved from shortstop, he then began to defend his shortstops ability by noting that De La Cruz was playing well until he tore his quad in late July and then after that his error total more than doubled as he made 14 of his 26 errors from that point forward.
Here’s quote from Krall: “Towards the end of July he was dealing with a partial torn quad. And he has been rehabbing, he was at the ballpark today. He’s been rehabbing this whole offseason. To his credit he played every day. He tried to grind through it. He tried to play through it.”
You can hear this specific question and statement at the 20-minute mark here. At some point word seemed to get around to the media who have the ability to contact Krall or word got back to him that his statement on the radio show were not going over well and he clarified his statements. Gordon Wittenmyer of the Cincinnati Enquirer was the first to publish this clarification, which turned out to be almost not a clarification at all.
“I said partial tear on the radio, meaning strain,” Krall said. “It was more nagging than serious.”
The only clarification made is that he said it was more nagging than serious.
The facts didn’t change too much. He said it was a partial tear on the radio show on Wednesday night. Then on Thursday morning he said the same thing, but added that it was nagging more than serious.
The facts here are still pretty simple even after the new statements:
The Reds still let their franchise superstar play with a torn quad.They not only let him play with a torn quad, they played him every. Single. Day.They not only let him play with a torn quad every single day. He served as the designated hitter one time after the All-Star break despite having a torn quad that they knew about and instead played him at shortstop 99% of the time. He was the team’s designated hitter three times in the first half.His performance in the second half was pretty bad. In nearly all aspects of the game. He didn’t hit for any power. He struggled to hit in any way for longer periods of time. And the defense took a step back a bit, too.
As we noted yesterday, there’s a lot going on here. De La Cruz wanted to play through it. He wanted to play every day. Good for him. Seriously. You want guys that want to play if they believe that they can play.
But the seasoned veterans of the club’s decision making tree needed to step in at some point. It starts at the top with Nick Krall. Everyone noticed that De La Cruz was playing poorly in the second half. Krall didn’t seem to step in and say “let’s give him a bit of a rest”. The same extends to general manager Brad Meador. The same extends to manager Terry Francona. And the same thing extends to the medical staff, who aren’t exactly involved in the “baseball decisions”, exactly, but even they had to be aware of what was going on.
All of those people seemed to fail in some way at protecting Elly De La Cruz, who is still rehabbing a “nagging” injury that the team has apparently known about since July (so we are now talking a 4-month long “nagging” injury). They risked further injury to him. And for what? So he could perform poorly for the entirety of the second half of the season? It’s one thing to say, “ok, he can play with this if he’s very careful with how he goes about the game” but at what point do you say “this isn’t really helping the team and we’re taking a risk of further injury”? Apparently there wasn’t a point for anyone involved here.
