Look, it’s not like management’s opinions are a surprise. A little more than a year ago, we were talking about Kevin Mather, the ex-Mariners president who made headlines by publicly bragging about service time manipulation and insulting current and ex-Mariners alike, such as Mike Leake, who he called a dick. That was probably the most important part of that whole thing.
And yet, at least Mather had the sense to only discuss his Secret Bad Opinions in what he thought was a closed room with other elites. It’s not like he went out there on a local radio show and said what he thought, and then later, as he was interviewed before the day’s game, did it again. You know, like an idiot.
Anyway, meet the Reds’ Phil Castellini.
Castellini, the COO of the team and, coincidentally, the son of CEO Bob Castellini, went on a sports talk show on WLW, Cincinnati’s news leader, and addressed the dissatisfaction of the Cincinnati Reds fanbase with the direction of the team.
Specifically, when asked why fans should trust the team’s top brass, he said:
"Well, where are you going to go? Let's start there. Sell the team to who? You want to have this debate? If you want to look at what would you do with this team to be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists, it would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else.
"So, be careful what you ask for. I think we're doing the best we can do with the resources that we have. We're no more pleased with the results than the fans. I'm not polishing any trophies in the office right now and that's what we're here to do.
"But, the bottom line is, I do think we've had to shift the discipline. We've tried a lot of things that didn't work. And they came this close to working and didn't. Nobody's got to tell me it didn't work. So, I think we've learned from those things and, trust me, Nick [Krall, Reds general manager] is a guy on a mission and he is a bull in a china shop that has his way to do it and he's doing just that."
Then later, when questioned about that quote on television, he said this:
“The answer is, are you gonna abandon being a Reds fan? Are you gonna abandon following this team? We haven't abandoned it. We haven't abandoned investing in the team and in the community, so the point is, how about everybody just settle down and celebrate and cheer for the team? You can hate on us all you want. We're not going anywhere. We haven't abandoned our commitment to winning and investing in this franchise and in this community. The point is, stay tuned and be a fan. celebrate these guys and look what they did in Atlanta and come out here and celebrate that today”
Then, after that didn’t go over well — and who’s to say why that is — he made it all better:
See? Nothing that a canned PR apology can’t fix. Ipso facto, everything’s fine.
Oh, I like to have fun here. Obviously, nothing was solved by that. No one thinks the apology is more sincere than the two separate interviews in which he arrogantly and blithely dismissed the fans’ concerns. A “Whoopsie!” isn’t gonna fix that. It isn’t gonna fix much of anything, but certainly not that.
Because what Castellini laid bare is the fact that the Cincinnati Reds absolutely do not give a fuck about their fans. And look, most front offices and ownership groups probably don’t give a fuck about their fans other than in a very abstract, practical, we-gotta-keep-these-guys-from-revolting situation.
Just look at what he said. “The answer is, are you gonna abandon being a Reds fan?” He was saying, yeah, we all know you don’t like that we traded almost all of our good players, but you can’t do anything about it. You’re trapped in this city with the Cincinnati Reds, and there’s not a thing you can do about it, sucker.
That was the tenor of his entire response. You’re lucky to have us, he was saying. Any other ownership group would have sold the team to out-of-towners who’d have moved it. Is that what you want, southern Ohio? Or would you rather have us? After all, we are investing in the team and in the community.
It’s interesting that he specifically mentioned investing on purpose, unprompted, because that is something that the Cincinnati Reds are absolutely not doing. Over the offseason, pre-lockout, they dumped a bunch of payroll in order to “align [their] resources," which is just a business-speak way of saying that they were being cheap as hell. Then post-lockout, they dumped a bunch more payroll to like, super-align those resources. Man, the three things keeping those resources from being aligned had to be Sonny Gray, Jesse Winker, and Eugenio Suarez. Smooth sailing now!
There comes a point when the bullshit is so transparent, so insulting that it just becomes unacceptable. “We haven't abandoned our commitment to winning and investing in this franchise and this community.” What do you think investing is, Phil Castellini? What do you think winning is? You are doing the opposite of investing! Most of your games, you are going to do the opposite of winning! Words have meanings!
You can’t just say shit, just absolute obvious drivel, and expect people to slobber all over you unless you become the 45th President of the United States. And you, Phil Castellini, are not the 45th President of the United States.
So when that apology came through, a clearly ghost-written piece of PR designed to kick that story out the door before company comes over, there was not a person in the world who took it seriously. Nor should they have, if we’re being honest, because it wasn’t a serious apology. It was nothing. It was a nothing statement from a nothing ownership group who have turned the Reds into a nothing team, because they can make more money that way and they think fans will live with it.
No, it’s not that they think fans will live with it. They think fans have to live with it. They see it as their God-given right to put a shit product on the field, a product way, way shittier than 2021’s product, and still receive the same support from the community. They feel entitled.
This is a plague that is rotting the entire sport from the inside. Ownership groups think that fans will stick around no matter what garbage they throw at them. They do not realize that fans will not cheer for a team that has nothing to cheer for. They see this as a moral failing of their fanbase, instead of a business failing of themselves. They are convinced that if you squeeze a stone hard enough, you can draw blood out of it.
I’ve never tried that, so I can’t say from experience that it won’t work. But from the outside, oh boy, it sure seems like that stone is dry as hell.