Cincinnati Reds: Understanding who’s running my team

One of a series of articles looking at the front office structure of each major league team. Today, we take a deep dive into the Cincinnati Reds.

Cincinnati Reds

• Owner: Robert Castellini
• President of Baseball Operations: Dick Williams
• Vice President/General Manager: Nick Krall

Castellini was a Cincinnati business leader – he ran a produce company – when a group he led purchased a controlling interest in the Reds from the Lindner family in 2005. One of his first acts was the hiring of  Wayne Krivsky, at the time a brash assistant general manager with the Twins, to run the team’s front office.

But when the Reds tanked in the final season of Krivsky’s three-year deal, Castellini fired him and turned top more experienced leadership in the form of long-time Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty. Since then, Castellini has adopted a hands-off approach, trusting in sequence Jocketty, his top aide, Williams, and Williams’ top aide, Krall.

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For the past 15 seasons, the result has been a stable, largely unified and empowered management structure. Williams came to the group shortly after Castellini’s purchase of the team. A University of Virginia graduate, he had worked on the George W. Bush re-election campaign and in investment banking prior to accepting a job as director of baseball operations.

Krall was already on the Cincinnati Reds payroll, albeit as a scout when Castellini arrived, and his ascent was more deliberate. He became Williams’ top aide in 2008 and has succeeded Williams following each of his boss’s promotions.

On-field success has been elusive. Under Jocketty, the Reds won divisional titles in 2010 and 2012.  Since his 2015 retirement, though, the Reds have only once finished outside the NL Central cellar.

That absence of success didn’t prevent Williams’ promotion from assistant GM to GM in 2015, his subsequent promotion to president of baseball ops in 2018, or the promotion of Krall to the GM position at that same time.

Those facts alone make the Reds something of a casebook study in the pluses and minuses of hands-off ownership.

From a financial standpoint, Castellini ought to be happy. Forbes values his franchise at $1.1 billion, more than a three-fold increase from its $331 million value a decade back. Revenues put at $257 million in 2019, have not risen nearly as sharply, yet the 54 percent gain (from $166 million in 2010) still boils down to better than 5 percent growth per season.

The problem is that the increasing demands of running a baseball team require more. A decade ago, Cincinnati’s $82 million payroll represented 49 percent of revenues; the $150 million Cincinnati spent on players in 2019 absorbed a 59 percent share. Teams that commit more than 60 percent of gross revenues to on-field talent will probably still be able to pay the light bill, but there won’t be much left over for profit, which remains what it has always been…the name of the game.

Team critics would probably respond that the Reds might want to try winning and see what impact that has on revenues. Attendance for 2019 was off 12 percent from 2010, and 800,000 below the franchise record of 2.63 million set in that wonderful year 1976.

Matching that figure would require the Cincinnati Reds to operate Great American Ballpark at 75 percent capacity for a full season, a high figure but hardly impossible. And since, counting parking, concessions, souvenirs and the like the Reds pull in about $64 per fan, hitting that attendance mark would by itself improve the revenue stream by more than $50 million.

Does that sound like an incentive to win?

There are many who believe the winning is about to happen. Williams and Krall have spent the first four seasons of their tenure stocking the Reds major league roster with an interesting assortment of young talent. Third baseman Eugenio Suarez is 28, outfielder Aristides Aquino is 26, ace starter Luis Castillo is 27 and center fielder Nick Senzel is 25.

A lineup larded with that talent certainly could break out in 2020. The only thing we know for sure is that Williams and Krall haven’t made it happen yet. Since taking over from Jocketty in 2016, the net impact of their moves on Reds fortunes, based on net short-term change in WAA per season*, has been -4.3 games.

Leaning too hard on that number could be unfair. Management sometimes concludes that in order to move forward it is first necessary to take some steps back. In their first season as a team, Williams and Krall levied a -12.1 game impact on the Reds fortunes. The number has improved annually to the extent that their impact last year – with the improvement process arguably beginning to bear fruit – was +4.9 games.

Going forward, the analysis is fairly simple: It’s time for Williams and Krall to produce. If they do, as many believe will happen, their patience will not only be rewarded but vindicated, and fans may be attracted.

There is, however, also danger in that equation. If the Cincinnati Reds, with that apparent surfeit of young talent, do not make the expected gains, it’s entirely possible that the patience of Reds fans – and more importantly of Castellini – could wear thin.

*This calculation is obtained by determining the net impact of all player transactions on team performance for the season(s) in question. Wins Above Average is a zero-based offshoot if Wins Above Replacement; thus, the final figure suggests the degree of positive or negative movement in the standings attributable to front office moves.