Red Reposter - Baseball’s Eve

• The Bell family has been mourning the loss of Mike who passed last week of a sudden and aggressive kidney cancer. He was only 44. CTrent wrote a wonderful piece here about baseball and family. Everyone here at Red Reporter sends our heartfelt condolences to the family in their time of grief.
• FiveThirtyEight has released their ELO ratings for the upcoming season and the Reds are projected to be a .500 team. The Brewers are projected to be the best team in the division but the NL Central as a whole is pretty clearly the worst division in baseball. Here’s the most relevant passage: “As for the Reds, Elo rates Cincinnati as the least-improved team in baseball in 2021, dropping eight ranking slots since the end of 2020.” The only word that comes close to describing how the Reds fared this winter is humiliating.
• We’ve all suspected it for a while, but it’s clear that the Castellini family has zero interest in actually fielding a decent ballclub worthy of your time. They have made better than $700 million in the value of the team since they bought it, but these shit-assses “don’t run the team to make a profit” and they say they put all profits back into the team. But what that really means is that they only count a small portion of their overall revenues in that calculation. This asinine accounting focuses only on cashflow, the ticket sales and advertising and player salaries and so on. How dumb is that? It’s really, really dumb.
• What they are saying is that the pandemic really put a dent in their income (a lot of folks can relate), but the big difference between the Reds and you is that they have real assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars and have the ability to take on low-interest debt to help clear any imbalances on the accounting sheet. It’s like, yeah, you lost your job last year, but you also own a half-dozen vacation homes, a car dealership, and a few Burger King franchises. Maybe you didn’t make as much income last year as you have in the past, but you ain’t poor. And they think you are dumb and they think they can tell you this dumb story and you are dumb enough to believe them.

Income =/= Wealth

Go, Reds. But the ownership group should sell the team and fuck right off. What good is a fucking multi-millionaire who constantly complains about his poverty? Can’t even afford a shortstop.