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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
yes, yes you can tell they are ran horribly worse then the world champion team, why krivsky ran them nearly 2 games worse



The World Champion team was not terribly good in the regular season, mainly because of the staggering number of injuries. Pujols and Rolen both missed 20 games, Edmonds missed 50, Spiezo missed 40, Mulder missed half the season, Isringhausen missed the last month. Chris Duncan and Anthony Reyes weren't promoted until well into the year.

The NL Central is by far the worst division in baseball, and that is the only reason the Cardinals even got the chance to win the World Series.

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Jim Jackson said:
And thanks for Joe Morgan. We loved him.



Not the Astros finest moment(I'm not a Lee May fan), but if you're trying to wound me, you should probably try referencing an event that didn't occur 15 years before I was born.

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ACtually, you must not have watched this season. The Reds, for the first time since 1999, were in it until the last week of the season (evinced by the fact that the Cardinals won only 3 more games than the Reds). The Reds of 06 made a variety of in-season trades in an effort to better themselves for a playoff run. Any "fan of baseball" should have seen that.



The Reds very well might have won it if not for those in-season trades you mention, though saying they were "in it" is pretty misleading, considering they finished seventh out of the 16 NL teams overall. Barely middle of the pack. Plus, although they did win 80 games, their pythagorean record was about five games worse, and their runs scored/runs allowed differential was not very good at all.

For Jim Bowden's many faults, he did leave the last two GM's with a pretty nice collection of offensive talent...which O'Brien and Krivsky have almost entirely squandered.

There was the lowballing of Barry Larking back in '04, who, even at 40, was still a pretty effective player. There was the signing of Scott Hatteberg, which negated arguably the best move they made in years(getting rid of Sean Casey), and prevented them from moving Adam Dunn to first base and thinning out the logjam in the outfield rather than senselessly trading valuable parts for nothing...which then led to one of the worst trades of the '06 season, where they gave up two of their best young position players for replacable middle relievers who weren't that great before they got to Cincy, and weren't even good after they arrived(Majewski had his 8.4 ERA, Bray a 4.23 ERA). It was a terrible move. I said it was a terrible move, a lot of people said it was a terrible move...the only people outside the Cincinnati front office who didn't seem to think it was a terrible move was bsams(who also thought the Eric Milton signing wasn't bad), and some local reporters who seemed to change their minds a few times in the assessment process.

And now they've replaced one of those aforementioned young, quality position players by overpaying for Alex Gonzalez, who will be 30 in February and just finished stinking it up in Boston.

There were a few other bad decisions. They extended Hatterberg on the basis of a first half they should have realized was fluke(the guy is 36 and has been mediocre everywhere else...why would he suddenly become great?). They didn't give Chris Denorfia consistent playing time at all, even though he completely outplayed the more popular Ryan Freel in September(Denorfia hit .352 that month, but for some bizarre reason split time with Freel, who bombed after a hot start to the year, hitting .208). They really should have forced Griffey to a corner spot eons ago, and that is an error that most likely cost him and the Reds a great deal of wins and money.

The Reds did make one or two small moves that paid off, a little. They traded for Eddie Guardado, who gave them about a dozen innings of quality work before tearing a ligament in his elbow, possibly ending his career. They also got Scott Schoeneweis, who gave them about the same number of innings, and was suprisingly, if not miraculously, good. I give them props for that. Still, it's two small successes buried under an avalance of failures, if you get my metaphor.

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
The Reds bullpen put up a combined 5.16 earned run average in the first half of last season, the retooled bullpen went 15-11 with a 3.51 ERA in the second half. Krivsky really ruined the bullpen didn't he?



I don't believe I said Krivsky ruined the bullpen, but whatever improvement that was made came from the players they already had, and the two small trades I just mentioned(not from the big trade which we've discussed in this thread). Of course, the stat you're mentioning there, which I'm not going to check but will assume is true, belies what was a collapse in almost every other regard for the team in the second half. Most notably, their offense crumbled thanks to the gaping hole left by the Kearns/Lopez trade and the fact that veterans like Aurilia, Hatteberg and Freel all came back down to earth and played more like they had been for the past decade; something you didn't exactly need a crystal ball to predict. It's called "regressing to the norm".

MisterJLA is RACKing awesome.