He’s been called a puppet of this dime store ownership, a product of an insular regime, ineffectual at best; clueless at worst. If you talk, write or simply offer up opinions online, you need a hook, a horse to whip to the finish line. That horse was once first and foremost David Bell. It’s now predictably shifted almost entirely to the Reds’ President of Baseball Operations, although manager Terry Francona is surely looking over his shoulder for what some have deemed insufficient postgame answers.
Many cannot—or will not—attempt to separate Krall from ownership, as if he too prefers doing more with less. And maybe he does. Maybe he’s in lockstep with his bosses and believes that draft and development alone is a viable path to success and competitive payrolls are nice to haves but not a necessity. But just as I cannot imagine Scottie Scheffler willingly playing the US Open with half the clubs in his bag, I find it hard to believe the head of the front office wouldn’t have liked to have had $60M to sign Pete Alonso for the next 2 years.
Instead, Krall is expected to pull rabbits out a very cheap hat made of felt, falling apart at the seems, as in, “seems he could have gotten more in that trade,” “seems he could have found someone better than an ordinary Joe,” “seems he could have offered Luis Castillo enough money and years to stay.”
The big, bold black mark on Krall’s ledger has arguably been the free agent signing of Jeimer Candelario. It’s difficult to know if his poor play since signing with the Reds has been that at age 30, he was beginning the downside of what has been an average career, or whether the injuries have been the primary cause of his demise.
In Brian Kenny’s 2016 book, Ahead of the Curve, he took a look at all the $100M contracts—free agent and contract extensions that kept a player home—and discovered that fully half were bad deals, the definition of “bad” being the front office likely wouldn’t do them over again if they possessed Dr. Emmett Brown’s time-traveling DeLorean.
Kenny came up with a methodology for identifying bad big free agent contracts and detailed five red flags, one of which was signing a player on the wrong side of 30. While the Candelario contract was nowhere in the dollar vicinity of Kenny’s analysis, the over-30 red flag stands, so it’s fair to hang the result around Krall’s neck if one is so inclined.
Nevertheless, looking back at the free agent choices available at the time, particularly in the outfield where the Reds desperately needed help, one sees a limited set of options. A 30-year old Lourdes Gurriel Jr. had a similarly productive year at the plate as Candelario, but it’s unclear how much more it would have taken to woo him away from a Diamondback clubhouse he was already very happy in after being acquired from the Blue Jays the previous off-season. Cody Bellinger’s asking price was way too high for the Castellini regime and Teoscar Hernández turned down a couple of multi-year offers to sign a one-year deal with the Dodgers because, well… Dodgers. Leftovers on the market included a 32-year old Joc Pederson, another go-round with Tommy Pham, a 36-year old David Peralta, Hunter Renfroe, and Jurickson Profar, a 31-year old coming off a 0.6 WAR season.
Critics of Krall point to organizations with smaller payrolls who have managed to produce better outcomes season after season, citing the Rays (of course), Cleveland, and closer to home, the Brewers. Follow Milwaukee fan talk on social media and you’ll hear the following:
“The sustainability of Brewers since they broke the playoff drought in ‘08 is because they never bottom out. They don’t sell the farm to go “all in” or overpay free agents. We can debate about whether that approach will win a title but we can’t debate that it doesn’t bring constant success/relevancy to the franchise. They will always be competitive because they can develop arms and take their time to debut players.”
Gosh. Isn’t this what Krall has been continually mocked for attempting to do?
Nick Krall said we were going to avoid peaks and valleys.
He has gotten his wish. #Reds pic.twitter.com/lZLBFRL7Ji
— Chatterbox Sports (@CBoxSports) June 4, 2025
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“Here’s the issue. When you climb Mt. Everest and you stop halfway through, you didn’t really climb Mt. Everest. You didn’t get to the top. You didn’t get to experience the joy, the thrill of why you’re there in the first place.”
The “avoiding the peaks and valleys” comment has deliberately been misinterpreted for the sole purpose of bludgeoning the remaining target now that The Manager That Shall Not Be Named has been relieved of his duties and the new savior has yet to lose his luster (although cracks in the Tito Fan Club are certainly showing). All this appeals to the vox populi, the frustrated folks across a fan base that want blood and don’t really care who has to give it.
If Krall were moved to elaborate, he might explain what—if we’re being honest—we already know: the “peaks” refer to the “all in” moves that inevitably result in the “valleys,” otherwise known as “rebuilds.” For that reason it’s meant that valuable prospects like Chase Burns, Rhett Lowder, and perhaps even Sal Stewart and Alfredo Duno are probably off limits, as they will be the future foundation to buttress the existing core from 2023 for an organization that is finally free of Joey Votto’s long contract and the learned lessons from the fiascos that were Mike Moustakas and Shogo Akiyama, as well as the jilting by Nick Castellanos, all in search of that elusive “peak.”
The Mount Everest analogy above would have been better served had it acknowledged that to reach the summit, one needs a solid physical foundation that comes with patient moves from base camp to the next camp and onward, one that recognizes that inevitably, supplemental oxygen is needed to get climbers to the summit.
And therein lies the problem. This ownership has little to no intention of providing that supplemental help when the time arrives. They won’t climb into the thin air of free agency and are unlikely to allow their GM to trade the quality prospects necessary to get a young core over the top for fear of finding themselves back in the valley, embarking on yet another rebuild.
So while Krall is trying to build a base camp of talent, while he was praised by prospect analysts throughout the game for the return on the trades he made, he’s been beset with injuries to CES, Marte, McLain, and Steer to go along with a good but unspectacular season so far from De La Cruz.
In February, Keith Law wrote the following for The Athletic:
“The Reds remain one of the best drafting teams in baseball, and their 2022-23 drafts alone seem likely to produce eight-to-10 big leaguers, while the 2024 draft at least started off with two potential impact players. They’ve had a little less success on the international side, as some of their bigger signings have struggled to develop, especially without an intermediate level between the complex league and Low A. It’s an above-average system and seems well set up to help the Reds contend again in the near future.”
Draft experts Jonathan Mayo, Jim Callis and Sam Dykstra opined the following in March:
“After the two first-round picks from the past two Drafts (Chase Burns and Rhett Lowder), who could both be in Cincy’s rotation this year, there’s a lot of offensive firepower here — eight of the next nine prospects in the Top 30 after Burns and Lowder are hitters. The Reds continue to do a nice job of refilling the system via the Draft (six of their Top 10), via trades (two) and via the international market (two).”
Brewer followers frequently reference the organization’s “pitching lab.” The Reds appear to have done something similar, whether they have a catchy name for it or not, and it’s beginning to pay off.
“For the last several years, the Milwaukee Brewers pitching staff has been one of the best in baseball. Whether it be the rotation or the bullpen, Milwaukee has kept opponents in check and gotten by with whatever offense it could gather. This formula has won the Brewers a lot of games … As a small-market team, the Brewers have limited financial resources compared to the bigger-market clubs, relying on prospects and reclamation projects to get the job done.”
Sounds very familiar to me. It appears he’s built a starting pitching foundation through draft and development. Krall brought in his own reclamation projects—Gavin Lux (.289/.382/.394 wRC+ 117), Austin Hays (.303/.346/.555 wRC+ 139) and solid backup catcher Jose Trevino (294/.325/.487 wRC+ 118), who has been an offensive revelation whose most important contribution will be keeping Tyler Stephenson fresh and hopefully healthy.
The front office has been lambasted for not going for it at the 2023 trading deadline, but as Charlie Goldsmith reported on his Substack, Krall attempted the India for Singer trade back then to shore up a wounded pitching staff that had Greene an Lodolo on the IL heading into August.
I continually read the same tired phases, such as “Krall is afraid to pull the trigger on a trade” and “Krall needs to work the phones.” The problem with “working the phones” is that there has to be somebody on the other end of the line. The first 3 months of a baseball season have historically never been a trade fest and that trend has only gotten worse with the addition of playoff teams, meaning the overwhelming number of front office head honchos are very reluctant to begin shuffling the deck if they are anywhere within hailing distance of .500, lest they anger their fan bases. Ironically, that didn’t stop the Brewers from trading Josh Hader at the 2022 trade deadline on the day they held a 3-game lead in the NL Central, only to miss the playoffs some 8 weeks later.
As for “pulling the trigger,” as I recently and accidentally found out from a reliable source, the ask for Luis Robert, Jr. was Matt McLain and Noelvi Marte; and the Sox were adamant and not in a bargaining mood. Would you have made that move? Can you imagine what anger would be blowing Nick Krall’s way had he pulled the trigger and in return gotten Robert, Jr.’s current .177 BA and 65 wRC+ production with his impending free agency on the horizon?
If you remain unconvinced of the competence of Krall’s work, if you remain an eager participant in the #GetKralled brigade, you must ask yourself this: Who do you replace him with? Because Theo Epstein isn’t walking thru the doors of 100 Joe Nuxhall Way. Krall wouldn’t be replaced by a front office master of the universe and handed a substantially larger payroll. Didn’t we learn anything from the hiring of Terry Francona, followed by the consensus view that Tito wouldn’t have taken the job without a commitment to demonstrably improve payroll?
Fans are continually sold a bill of goods they willingly consume. If only we had a hall of fame manager we’d be ten games better and playoff bound instead of a fool who keeps taking the starting pitcher out too early. If only our clueless front office had signed Luis Castillo or at least received players in return who were impervious to injury. If only we quit listening to those darn nerds and went back to a day when men were men and RBIs were the true measure of a ballplayer’s worth. For all the time I’ve been writing about the Reds, the losing has always laid at the foot of whoever is in the dugout, with the guy in the office above not far behind. The late Walt Jocketty was excoriated on a weekly basis. Dick Williams was labeled little more than a nepo baby. Now, it’s Nick Krall’s turn in the barrel. Nothing changes. The only constant has been ownership.
Funny how that works.
The social media environment today makes it tough to find fair and honest critique. Everyone with a mic and access to the internet doesn’t want to talk about ownership. That’s old news. It doesn’t drive the narrative. The people responsible for this mess largely stay away from scrutiny, preferring a quiet corner table at Jeff Ruby’s, away from the scrum. Fresh content is the order of the day. New outrages to chew on are grist for the mill. Every day there is a new lineup to question, with new manager’s postgame remarks to over-analyze, another minor player signing to ridicule, all in search of those coveted clicks and retweets, all done with the comfort of knowing that whatever silly thing said today will all be forgotten tomorrow as the rage machine marches on to the next indignity.
I mean, who knows what tomorrow will bring.