Doc: Reds' fix is between the numbers and chemistry

While Walt Jocketty is busy re-booting the Reds (and seemingly acquiring young, would-be middle relief pitchers by the ton), he needs to do it with an eye on retooling the clubhouse culture as well. The Reds general manager did it once before, with very good results. A sequel won’t be easy.

In 2008, Jocketty began to rebuild the Reds by tearing them down. It might have seemed counterintuitive to trade Junior Griffey and Adam Dunn for Nick Masset and a jar of eye-black. It was anything but. Relieving the mostly young and impressionable clubhouse of its two most entitled veterans was a master stroke.

It wasn’t that the two reigning stars on the bad Reds clubs of the 2000s were disliked. They weren’t. And it wasn’t that they didn’t give the game all they had. They did, when they weren’t splayed across the leather couches in the clubhouse, reading car magazines. Griffey’s legs were jelly. For him, not running hard on a routine groundout wasn’t entitlement. It was self preservation.

Dunn played through countless knee hurts. His self deprecation let everyone know he wanted to be a good player.

Howevuh...

Their presences were overly large and influential. When 21-year-old Jay Bruce joined them on the sofas, something had to be done. Jocketty followed up those deals by adding Scott Rolen at the ’09 trade deadline. The winning that followed wasn’t coincidental.

This comes to mind now, as the Reds have made losing as habitual and destructive as a pinch between cheek and gum. They are playing with a Class AAAA roster, yes. They’re also playing with no direction, or any of the passion you might expect from young players getting their first chance at The Show.

Any trades the Reds make between now and next March better address leadership and character. There is no Bronson Arroyo now, showing kid pitchers how to be pros. There needs to be. Rolen left. Nobody replaced him. The results are instructive.

The numbers crowd laughs at this. Chemistry is something you flunk in high school. If you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t belong.

That’s wrong, of course.

Cincinnati resident and former newspaper colleague Lonnie Wheeler has written a book on this subject. Intangiball, The Subtle Things That Win Baseball Games doesn’t diminish the importance of statistics in determining a player’s worth. Intangiball simply suggests that intangibles matter. Or, as former Yankees manager Joe Torre advised his GM Brian Cashman, “Never forget there is a heartbeat in this game."

Wheeler studies the years between 2008 and 2012, taking extended looks at the Reds, Phillies and Rays, three teams undeniably influenced by anything but analytics.

“The intangibles fill the gap between statistical performance and actual reality," Wheeler said Saturday. “I don’t want people to read this and say, ‘The Reds focused on intangibles and culture, and now look where they are.’ There’s so much more to it than that. The culture has to be a big part. But I would never say it’s more important than the talent."

And yet, as Lance Berkman, a champion with the 2011 Cardinals, put it, “The disparity in talent a lot of times is not much. What separates teams is that attitude, that culture, that expectation of winning."

Player after player in Intangiball honors the importance of culture. Tony La Russa, always seen as the ultimate manage-by-numbers skipper, said the numbers approach “has a lot of limitations. These are people, not machines."

Rolen represents a classic case. “Need ya on third, Brucie" became a mantra for the 2010 Reds. It was Rolen, suggesting the Reds always look to take the extra base. The analytics crowd would dismiss that, and show you numbers that indicated the Reds took too many chances on the bases that year, and too often paid the price in outs.

The Intangiballs would say that Rolen’s point – be aggressive, be confident, test limits – was more important to that team’s overall swagger than any extra outs it made while demonstrating it.

You pick your side. I’m in the middle, with Wheeler. Numbers matter. They do not matter completely.

Wheeler called the trades of Griffey and Dunn “the wisest thing Jocketty has done" as Reds GM. He looks at the current group of flounderers and says, “When you watch them, they don’t win any games late, they don’t rally, they don’t execute fundamentally." Jocketty “basically has to do it again."

That is, Jocketty has to find good players whose assets can’t all be measured with a speed gun and a spreadsheet. Is there an Orlando Cabrera out there somewhere? A Coco Cordero, a Jonny Gomes? The Reds need to find out.