Breaking: All-Star Pitcher Betrays Cincinnati Reds With ”Surprise” 6-Year Deal With Hated Rival  

Breaking: All-Star Pitcher Betrays Cincinnati Reds With ”Surprise” 6-Year Deal With Hated Rival

There are two things that are pretty paramount for making a sports team something you’ll go out of your way to watch, and the first is obvious:

You’ve got to win games.Winning is enjoyable. It’s satisfying. It’s engaging to see the team whose logo you wear on your hat score more points before the final whistle. If you’re going to spend all that time, money, effort, and adrenaline to root for something, well, it’s nice to be rewarded with a good outcome.

The early-aughts Cincinnati Reds were decidedly not good. No bueno. From 2001 through 2009 they never once finished higher than 3rd in the NL Central, finished dead last on five occasions, and only once won so many as 80 games in a season (just 80, still a losing record). But man, did they ever sock the hell out of some homers. Adam Dunn hit balls 535 feet, Junior Griffey pulled them into the RF seats of the stadium he built (when healthy), and even Austin Kearns and Felipe Lopez managed to get in on that action, too. The Reds were bad – really bad – but they were at least an enjoyable bunch of idiots getting sent to the showers after 12-10 losses.

The David Bell Era of Reds baseball featured almost exclusively none of either. Their surprise 2023 was so out of left field that not even the front office believed in it at the deadline, and that season burnt out like a snap-pop. The rest of his years were lifeless, dingerless campaigns where we all were just forced to play the waiting game, rebuilding seasons featuring a manager with daily interviews that were less engaged as a nun. That entire era featured zero winning and was as entertaining as finding sand in your swim trunks two hours after you’d left the beach.

I still don’t know how good the 2025 Cincinnati Reds were. They snuck into the playoffs with 83 wins, and there’s a part of me that wonders if this is just how good this group can ever be if they stay as healthy as they did this year. That’s me actively wondering that in a year where Hunter Greene, Rhett Lowder, Austin Hays, Noelvi Marte, and Tyler Stephenson all got hurt we still saw about as much of them collectively as we ever will. They were better than they’d been in a while, though, and the stagnant malaise of the Bell Era officially had been turned over to the gregarious Terry Francona.

Francona, as the title way above that meandering series of side notes suggested, was named a finalist for the NL Manager of the Year Award late Monday night. He was joined in the finalists group by Pat Murphy of the Milwaukee Brewers and Rob Thomson of the Philadelphia Phillies, and while I don’t think Tito has a shot in heck at actually winning this award (this time around), I do think it’s worth pointing out that the Reds significantly improved in both paramount aspects of why you go out of your way to watch a team play sports.

In the second aspect – being fun, funny, and/or entertaining – it was Tito himself providing the gas. While many of his managerial tendencies scream old school and dated, it’s impossible not to want to hear him talk about the game of baseball. He’s a riot, we get to hear him and read about his thoughts, and that’s precisely what the players in the dugout get way more often than we ever do. Francona lights up a clubhouse in ways few others ever have, and that’s vital in a sport where you play every single day for six-plus months while travelling constantly.

For that latter part I applaud him more than I do for the 83 wins, though as I opined already, I’m not truly sure any manager out there could coax a whole lot more out of this roster than that. The rest of the winning needs to come from the owners and front office (groan), and the fact that Francona is a finalist at all reflects that I’m far from the only person who thinks that. The BBWAA voters put him in that trio of finalists not for having won 83 games, but for having won 83 games with this roster from this franchise.

In other Reds news, bench coach Brad Mills retired. He’s 68 and seen a ton, and despite being Tito’s right-hand man for decades he found it time to hang up his spikes for good.