Last Friday and Saturday, the Cincinnati Reds routed the Pittsburgh Pirates in back-to-back games by a combined score of 15-4. The Reds were 74-80 when the Pirates came to town for the three-game series, and their chances of finishing above .500 and matching last year’s 82-80 record were slim, but they kept those hopes alive over those two games. Then Paul Skenes took the mound.
On Sunday, the Pirates pulled off a shutout on the back of five brilliant innings from their first-year ace. It was the third time the rookie phenom has dominated the Reds this season. Cincinnati managed just three hits and one walk all afternoon, striking out 13 times (nine against Skenes). After Jonathan India, Elly De La Cruz, and Tyler Stephenson went down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth, the Reds fell to 76-81, assuring they would finish with a worse record than they did last season.
Around 6:30 that evening, president of baseball operations Nick Krall informed manager David Bell that his services were no longer required. Bench coach Freddie Benavides was named the interim manager for the five games remaining in the 2024 season. This was Bell’s sixth season as the Reds manager.
He also managed in their minor league system from 2009-12, giving him just under 10 years of service with the club. Although he’s the only member of the Bell family’s three generations of major leaguers to never play for the Reds — his grandfather, father, and brother all suited up for the family team – David is the Bell who spent the most time with the club.
Krall inadvertently set off alarm bells a couple of weeks ago, when he sidestepped a question asking him to confirm if Bell would be back in 2025. At the time, Krall suggested he would “evaluate everything at the end of the year.” Evidently, the end of the year wasn’t coming soon enough.
Indeed, Krall had this to say at Monday’s press conference about Bell’s dismissal: “If we make the decision now, it allows us to meet with everybody on the last road trip. It allows us to start this process and gives us a week head start as opposed to waiting when you know what the decision is going to be.”
Still, it’s hard to think Bell’s late-season firing wasn’t about public perception, at least in part. An extra week at the end of September doesn’t seem like it would be particularly beneficial in the managerial hiring process.
I’ve never worked in an MLB front office, but I did go to high school, and I can tell you this. When a teenager breaks up with their high school sweetheart after graduation, it just means they’re looking for new experiences in college. But if they do the dumping a week before graduation, they probably also want to stir up some drama. Likewise, a managerial firing this late in the season is about making a statement, one that can be read as a grand gesture of sorts: An executive is trying to show fans that the team is taking its disappointing season very seriously. Over the past six years, Bell developed a reputation for picking fights with umpires and getting ejected on behalf of his team. It often didn’t matter if the argument was justified; it was a symbolic sign of support for his players as much as anything else. This time, sadly, it’s his own team that has ejected him. It doesn’t matter if it was justified, and it may have been symbolic as much as anything else.
Six-and-a-half years ago, when Krall was merely an assistant general manager, the Reds made an even more dramatic gesture: They fired manager Bryan Price 18 games into the 2018 season. The following offseason, Bell was hired to replace interim manager Jim Riggleman, who had stepped in for Price. The Price/Riggleman years were a dark time for the Reds. They went 343-467 (.423), never finishing higher than fourth in the NL Central. Bringing in Bell was supposed to represent the beginning of a new era, as the team came out on the other side of the rebuilding process.
Lo and behold, the first-time manager (ahem) answered the bell during his first season at the helm. The Reds went 75-87 with a -10 run differential in 2019, a notable improvement over their 67-95 record and -123 run differential from the year before. They improved again in 2020, finishing above .500 (31-29) for the first time since 2013. They even made the playoffs that year, albeit as the NL’s seventh seed in an expanded postseason format.
Bell and the Reds took another incremental step forward in 2021. They finished 83-79 with a +26 run differential, marking the first time in eight years that they scored more runs than they allowed. While the Reds missed the playoffs that year, they finished with the sixth-best record in the NL and would have qualified under the 12-team postseason format that was introduced the following season. The front office, clearly pleased with the way the team was progressing under Bell’s leadership, extended him through the 2023 season.
Unfortunately, the 2022 campaign marked a huge step backward for Bell’s squad, though that could hardly be attributed to the manager. Nick Castellanos left in free agency, while the front office dumped Sonny Gray, Jesse Winker, Eugenio Suárez, and Wade Miley to cut costs. Those were the moves that ultimately led president and chief operating officer Phil Castellini to ask the fanbase his now infamous question: “Where are you gonna go?”
Adding injury to insult, the Reds lost more players to the IL than just about any other team that season. After the year got off to a predictably poor start, the front office sold big at the trade deadline, shipping off Luis Castillo and Tyler Mahle, among several other players. Following a glacial 2022-23 offseason, it seemed as if the Reds were content to enter another rebuild without ever having truly escaped the first. It was this offseason that Castellini suggested his club was out of contention before the season even began.
While he acknowledged the wealth of talent in the farm system, he also “joked” that the team would inevitably lose all those promising young players in the future. Yet, Bell and the Reds surprised the baseball world in 2023, surpassing all expectations to finish 82-80. The manager entered the season a lame duck, and it wouldn’t have been surprising to see him fired if the team struggled once again. Instead, with Cincinnati sitting in postseason position on July 28, 2023, he signed another contract extension, this time a three-year deal running through the 2026 campaign.
After Bell signed his new deal, however, the Reds went 26-32 over the rest of the season. Add that to this year’s 76-81 record, and the Reds have gone 102-113 since Bell put pen to paper. Needless to say, that’s not what the front office was hoping for. At the same time, it’s not as if the Reds have wildly underperformed over the last 14 months.
It was clear as a bell they were playing over their heads in 2023. When Bell signed his latest extension, the Reds were holding the final NL Wild Card spot, but their run differential was -6. Their playoff odds were only 28.9%; their projected rest-of-season record was 26-32. As for 2024, Bell’s squad came into the year with just a 23.1% chance of making the playoffs and a 79-83 projected record. All the Reds have to do is go 3-2 over their final five games and they’ll hit that projection on the head. In other words, the team wasn’t exactly set up for success.
The front office assembled a slightly below-average roster; in turn, Bell managed that roster to a slightly below-average record. At the same time, it’s not unreasonable to expect a manager to help his players surpass their 50th-percentile projections. One could argue that a manager who only ever meets preseason expectations isn’t doing enough. Yet, even if the Reds were holding Bell to that high standard, I’m having trouble seeing how he didn’t…
