You Cannot Win if You Do Not Pay

Reds and Greene: A Leap of Faith

Sports Illustrated

Every player contract is based on a hope and a wish. Optimism is the coin of the realm. Every time a pro team makes a money offer to a player and the player says yes, the nail-biting begins. The better the player, the bigger the bite.

The Reds made a commitment to Hunter Greene Tuesday. By baseball standards, it wasn’t an especially large commitment: Six years, $53 million. That’s $10 million more than Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander are making.

This year.

Before Tuesday, the most expensive pitcher on the Reds roster was. . . Luis Cessa. He’s making $2.65 mil.

And lest we forget, the Club is paying Junior Griffey $3,593,750 this season. And Mike Moustakas, um, ah, er, $22 mil. It’s all relative, I guess.

With the Greene signing, the Reds are saying, “We’re trying. In our own, limited, balance the budget, keep-the-shareholders-happy way, we are trying to tell you that we’re doing what we can with what we have.’’

You might or might not buy that. The team’s books are not open for public perusal, so none us truly knows the percentage of truth in that statement. But the Greene signing was a gesture of goodwill, a welcome sign of effort and further evidence there is a Plan/Vision/Something Other Than Wandering taking place.

But what a dice roll.

Long-term deals for pitchers aren’t necessarily a great idea, especially when the pitcher throws harder than anyone in the game, has already had Tommy John surgery and last year missed a month with a shoulder strain. Call it the Stephen Strasburg Postulate.

The Washington Nationals have no fingernails left after dealing with Strasburg, a very good pitcher when he’s healthy, but who’s almost never healthy. According to Spotrac, a website devoted to player-contract numbers, the Nationals have paid Strasburg $196.5 million since 2010. He has 113 wins. Strasburg has made seven starts since 2019. In his last start, June 9, 2022, he allowed seven runs in four innings.

It’s not Strasburg’s fault his arm is the way it is. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s saying that throwing money and years at starting pitching is like dropping silver dollars into the bandits at Belterra. Baby turtles waddling from the nest to the ocean have a better survival rate.

Greene, who received a $2 million signing bonus, is guaranteed $1 million in 2023, $3 million in '24, $6 million in '25, $8 million in '26, $15 million in '27 and $16 million in '28. (Enquirer)

But a club like the Reds has to do a deal like this. The Reds have to be proactive and lucky. They can’t throw Lotto-winning money at pitchers. Nor can they make mistakes on who gets the limited dollars they have. The Rays seem able to churn out quality young pitchers year after year, hence they can keep their costs low. It reamins to be seen if the current Reds regime has that skill.

Greene will make a total of $10 mil for this year and the next two. That’s incredibly cheap. If Greene pitches the way the Reds believe he will, the contract will go down as among the best in club history.

But man, it’s like walking into a field of land mines without a metal detector.

Now, then. . .

The NL’s best manager?

SORT OF ALONG THOSE LINES, here’s an excellent recent story from the NY Times on Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell. The Reds are more closely aligned with the Brewers than with the Rays, if only because they share a division. The Milwaukee market is smaller than this one, significantly so if you consider the large metro areas within a few hours of downtown Cincinnati. (Milwaukee is near Chicago, but no one would consider Chicago a Brewers town.)

Yet the Brewers compete almost every year. They have a starry starting rotation and a credible bullpen. And Counsell, among the best managers in the game. Also, the NL’s longest tenured, having managed the Crew since 2015.

He’s a local guy, same as David Bell. Times:

As a boy, he helped out at old County Stadium, sorting Robin Yount’s fan mail

In his late 30s and early 40s, he played more than 700 games as a Brewers infielder. (Earlier this month, he became) the franchise leader in games managed, with 1,181.

Counsell grew up in suburban Milwaukee and never left. His dad worked in the Brewers front office. He is 52. David Bell is 50. There is no reason the Reds can’t be the Brewers. No excuse they cannot embody the ideas Craig Counsell so eloquently expressed below, to the Times.

Read this and try not to nod your head in agreement:

“The No. 1 goal is to really have baseball be relevant here in Wisconsin and Milwaukee,” Counsell said. “Keeping that alive is really what you have to shoot for every day, and the World Series is kind of like a result of all that.”

He added: “I think that’s really important, that we’re putting something on that’s fun to watch. And we do give ourselves a chance — we’ve made some runs, and one of these times it’s going to result in the whole thing. Our job is to just keep doing that. That creates fans, and that creates people passing the sport on generationally.”

“We’re an entertainment venue for everybody, and to be a place that creates community pride is important,” Counsell said. “I think we’re doing that, and I know that means there’s another generation of baseball fans being created. And that’s a great thing for our area.”

Amen and amen. The story was headlined, The Man Who Keeps Baseball Relevant in Milwaukee.

We could look back and see the Greene signing as a first step on Cincinnati’s road to Milwaukee.

Meanwhile. . .

MY PAL AND ACE WRITER/REPORTER Paul Dehner Jr. is reporting in The Athletic that if Joe Mixon doesn’t take a pay cut, the Bengals will cut him.

Can you see my shoulders shrugging?

Mixon has 2 years left on a contract that’s paying him $48 mil for four years. He might be worth that somewhere. Here?

It doesn’t help Mixon that he’s caught up in the middle of trouble. He’s supposed to be in court today, to face charges that he pointed a gun at a woman in January, during a road rage incident.

That wouldn’t faze the Bengals if they believed Mixon vital. Fact is, running backs in the NFL aren’t the must-haves they once were. You can win without a great one. The Chiefs have for awhile now.

That said, the Men have no one with league bona fides at the position. If they can find a back who can receive and pass-block, and do it for far less than Mixon is making, they will.

REDS ATTENDANCE. . . I didn’t mention it, because (1) its terrible-ness is obvious, (2) Who wants to sit and freeze at the Small Park? and (3) See #1. You can believe The Big Man isn’t taking it well. He has always been attuned to the attendance. Unlike, say, the robber in Pittsburgh, who takes his rev-sharing checks and goes home happy.

It is a statement, though, one that can’t be ignored. FC Cincinnati is gladly accepting Redsfan refugees.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . My good friend Maximus is a country music fan. I’ve known him 20 years and I didn’t know that. I am not much into country, with one big exception. I really enjoy Robert Earl Keen, a Texas twanger of the first order.

Max doesn’t know REK. I plan on introducing the two soon, via Apple Music. Here’s one of my Robert Earl faves.

Meantime, if you’re a novice REK person and would like to dip a toe in that water, here are the tunes I’ll be sending Maximus:

Live tunes: Sonora’s Death Row, The Road Goes on Forever, Merry Christmas From the Family, Think It Over One Time, Dreadful Selfish Crime and Gringo Honeymoon;

Studio tunes: Levelland, I Gotta Go, Feeling Good Again, Something I Do.

TML sez ckimout.