“Well, where ya gonna go?”

Happy Opening Day*, folks.

I truly hope that a good portion of the folks who stumble across this corner of the internet today do so from their phones while down at The Banks, beverage in the other hand, immersed in a sea of red along side the Ohio River. I can only express how sorry I am that it took until April 12th for you to be there, in that glorious scenario, thanks to the greed of the collective ownership of Major League Baseball locking out the players for a hundred days this winter.

Those of you who are there are there for the game of baseball, the sport of baseball, and the team that plays said sport in the heart of Cincinnati. You’re there because your parents were there, your grandparents and uncles and cousins. You’re there because the Cincinnati Reds are Cincinnati, and so are you.

From Thoerner to Stern, from Johnson to Brush, through Hermann, McDiarmid, Weil, Crosley, DeWitt, Dale, Nippert, Williams, Schott, and Lindner, you have been the Cincinnati Reds, as ownership teams and families have come and gone.

The Castellinis have the high card among the owners of the team right now. They won’t forever, though, and you will still be the Cincinnati Reds. I don’t need to be telling any of you this, of course, as that’s simply part of the fabric of your being.

As it turns out, though, there’s a certain someone out there who does need to hear that. As it also turns out, that person is the COO of the franchise at the moment, and despite the fact that the team on the field is you and yours, he wants you to know he thinks he gets to be gatekeeper of that in all forms and fashions.

He said so, as much, in his interview on Opening Day with the fine folks at 700 WLW, relayed here by Twitter friend Wooo (hi, Twitter friend Wooo, and sorry about your mentions today).

“Well, where are you gonna go?”

In response to fans questioning his previous request that they have ‘faith’ in the current ownership to finally do something correct after 15 years of almost complete failure, he asks where are you gonna go before going on to suggest that moving the Reds out of Cincinnati would be a more viable option for them.

The smugness is infuriating. The audacity to suggest he’s got that power is hilarious. The ignorance to suggest there’s not a way to make money in a $12 billion monopoly under the current construction is blissful.

Don’t, for one second, let these jerks try to dictate who you are as the Cincinnati Reds, or how you choose to operate. Don’t let them think they get to be that arbiter, because they aren’t.

What a disaster this has become.