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When the Cincinnati Reds fired manager David Bell, like many other Reds fans, I couldn’t help but be excited at the fact that owner Bob Castellini was finally trying to run a winning team.
My excitement skyrocketed two weeks later, when the team somehow got Terry “Tito” Francona to come out of medical retirement to manage a Reds baseball team that seemed to — for the first time since the days of Pete Rose and Barry Larkin — want to win games.
In the 2020 COVID-19 shortened season, Francona only managed 14 games due to a staph infection and gastrointestinal problems. His infection also caused him to miss the second half of the 2021 season. He wouldn’t risk his health by coming out of retirement just to coach the Reds to records of 82-80 for three years.
When healthy, Francona is an incredible manager. As a Boston Red Sox fan too, I definitely have fond memories of him winning the 2004 and 2007 World Series.
Other than the two championships, Tito’s resume includes three American League Manager of the Year awards in 2013, 2016 and 2022, and another World Series berth in 2016 with the Cleveland Guardians.
Hiring Francona is definitely a big move, but to commit to winning, much more needs to be done before Opening Day.
The first step was to hire a good hitting coach, and that has been knocked out of the park — no pun intended — with the hire of Chris Valaika.
Valaika was the hitting coach of the Guardians from 2022 to 2024, and in each of those years the Guardians seemed to produce a random player that starts hitting out of their mind.
All I have to say is that if he can turn Oscar Gonzalez into a .296 hitter, a player that, without him, is wasting away in minor leagues for the New York Yankees, I would say he is a pretty good hire.
The next step is to trust in some of the young players the Reds have. The Reds were terrible in 2022, and that netted them the seventh overall pick in the 2023 MLB Draft. With that pick, they took a right-handed pitcher named Rhett Lowder. Since that moment, he flew through the minor leagues, got to the majors and has been absolutely lights out.
Lowder, in six starts and 30 innings pitched, put up a 1.17 ERA and did not give up a single home run. He needs to be a part of the starting rotation next year.
More young players the team needs to have faith in include Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Noelvi Marte, players who weren’t great last season but had their fair share of issues, with the former dealing with a wrist injury and the latter being suspended for drug use.
The final step is to make at LEAST one big move with this free agency. Ideally, the best move we could make would be to bring in Anthony Santander. If there is anything the Reds need, it’s a power hitter. Elly de la Cruz’s 25 home runs lead the team in 2023, but only six other players cracked double digits. Santander mashed 44 homers this year, while also having a strikeout rate below league average and a walk rate above average. The Venezuelan right fielder’s raw power could easily add so much to the already great lineup.
A few other pieces the club could bring in to provide some help would be a couple bullpen arms, a contact hitting third baseman and a new backup catcher.
If the Reds can keep this offseason as stirring as it started, this year could be one of the best since 2020 when they signed Nick Castellanos.