The Reds held serve against the Rockies, but that doesn’t make them ‘buyers’ just yet
It was just the Rockies, after all.
The Cincinnati Reds held serve against perhaps the worst-run sports franchise in America this week, taking 3 out of 4 against the Colorado Rockies and maintaining their resident spot in shouting distance of the expanded playoffs.
At 45-49, they’re still technically tied for last place in the National League Central. They’re also just a half-game out of 3rd place in the division and a sporting 3 games back of the final NL Wild Card spot, and now have a trio of games against the Miami Marlins - who somehow sit a half-game behind the Rockies for the worst record in the NL - with a chance to further make a statement before the All Star break.
That’s precisely what GM Brad Meador hoped he’d see from this unit, as he intimated to The Enquirer’s Gordon Wittenmeyer earlier in the week. The whiplash you get from saying tied for last place and only 3 games out of a playoff spot is indicative of the nature of this year’s trade season, with the expanded playoffs providing false dillusions for more clubs than it once did, thereby turning should-be sellers into active shoppers - at certain prices.
It remains to be seen just how aggressive this Reds club will be as the deadline approaches. Keep in mind this is the same club that opted against making major additions to a flawed 2023 club that was once 9 games over the .500 mark and in 1st place in the NL Central. All of the prospects they so adored at this time last year have struggle to replicate their successes of 2023, so it wouldn’t just be a departure in the front office’s strategy to get more aggressive as a last-place team than they did as a 1st place team, but it would also require selling incredibly low on several key pieces of the farm when they so recently opted against selling high on them.
That spells long game, to me. We’ll get the requisite talk of TJ Friedl being close to returning, that Matt McLain will be around for the stretch run, and that Brandon Williamson will be around to pick up the August/September innings that the young staff otherwise would have trouble managing.
The fact is, though, that some of those other teams in the foggy NL Wild Card mix are going to get aggressive. It goes without saying that the teams above the Wild Card mix and actually in the drivers’ seats of their respective divisions will remain aggressive, too. Finding pieces that fit your needs now is the bare minimum you can do to keep pace - it’s not a recipe for automatically jumping the glut of teams ahead and around you in the standings.
We’ll get to see just how much 2024 really matters to this front office, this ownership group. We saw how little 2023 mattered, and we’ve seen countless other years that never even mattered from the start. Do you really get any indication that there’s added emphasis to this, a season that’s held promise in several areas but lackluster performance elsewhere? Do you even remember the last time this franchise acted as if actually posting wins in the win column was an urgent need?
I think we all know where this is going. The least they could do is sweep the Marlins this weekend to give us the slightest bit of hope that urgency can, and should, return.