The reds are a joke. Not a heartbreaking knee-slapper either. I’m talking about a “Forces the audience to demand a refund” type joke, aka regular Amy Schumer material. The Reds’ record is a miserable 3-22. To put that in perspective, only one team in baseball’s modern era (since 1901) had a worse 25-game stretch to start a season than the Reds: the 1988 Baltimore Orioles (2-23). There are better ones Probability that the person closest to you is illiterate (21 percent) than the Reds, who just won a game (12 percent). I don’t know if that looks worse for the American education system or the Reds.
The Reds have NL-worst 3.16 runs per game. Nearly half a run per game behind second-worst NL team, Arizona (3.5). They scored a total of 79 runs. Couple that with their major league-worst 6.86 team ERA and you have the makings of an absolute disaster. That 6.86 mark is more than a run and a half behind the second-worst team in MLB, Washington (5.03). If Cincinnati doubled their run count this season, they’d still be two runs away from the number of runs they’ve allowed to earn so far. Basically, if Cincinnati’s offense was twice theirs, they’d still only be sitting around .500.
Refueling has never been nice. We know that, but at the very least, when a team has tanks, they’re expected to have a great young player with superstar potential with the first overall pick in the draft. That’s still true in baseball, but thanks to the new CBA which went into effect in March, by 2023 the team with the worst record in baseball will only have a 16.5 percent chance of winning the first overall win. The teams with the second and third worst records in baseball are also given the same chances. That this doesn’t start until 2023 doesn’t help the Reds this year either, because the 2022 draft lottery odds are based on where they were in 2021, and the Reds were over .500 in 2021.
But wait! there is more! The new CBA also dictates that no team, no matter how bad, can get the top 6 lottery picks three years in a row. If the reds don’t get their shit together by 2024, they’re basically just screwed. They can’t get a good draft pick, and their team still sucks. It’s quickly the pickle the Reds were in and there’s nothing they can do about it. Well they could have tried to keep Jesse Winker, Eugenio Suarez and Nick Castellanos I think. They could have also tried bolstering their rotation or bullpen during the off-season instead of playing with their thumbs, but hey, what do I know? I don’t run a baseball team.
All of these draft changes mentioned in the new CBA should discourage teams from tanking. So the geniuses who are the Reds’ front office decided that less than two months after this CBA was approved, they would be tanking harder than any Panzer IV the Germans could have brought to a battlefield during WWII.
The timing is nothing short of ridiculous. They decided to immediately throw out the 2022 season after the MLB and MLBPA decided to change the draft to make tanking less profitable. Remarkable! They read the new CBA, saw what was in place, and still decided to sell Eugenio Suarez and Jesse Winker to the Mariners just days later. Really awesome!
