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MLB’s top prospects provide hope for rebuilding teams. Why do ownership progeny insist on souring it?

MLB's top prospects provide hope for rebuilding teams. Why do ownership progeny insist on souring it?

Baseball’s season of eternal hope is dawning. No, it’s not exactly spring, but the summer game’s optimism sprouts long before actual greenery.

The new year is no longer all that new. MLB’s offseason free-agent market is mostly through with its business. And the unwieldy bounty of last year’s less visible work is being harvested and organized into those two main sources of anticipatory sustenance: projections and prospect rankings.

For surefire contenders, there are division rivals and pennant chases to banter about. For teams currently less certain of their October plans, there are the players who might change that — this year or for the next decade. Fans of clubs with bleak immediate outlooks have increasingly found solace and even excitement in the talent bubbling up through the minors.

There are, once again, many Large Adult Sons to hype up and rally around. If only the Rich Adult Sons could get out of the way.

In Cincinnati, many Reds fans likely turned the calendar with hard-earned finality. That was the teardown. This is the buildup toward something bigger and better. This is the team rolling out the collection of young players acquired for Luis Castillo, Tyler Mahle and others. This is the team awaiting the towering but twitchy Elly De La Cruz, the 6-foot-5 marvel of a shortstop who might be baseball’s answer to Victor Wembanyama.

They didn’t even make it to the end of January before that sunny program was replaced by a new episode of an unsolicited, unwanted, nepo baby comedy — too dour and too ham-handed to be called a “Succession” ripoff and more infuriating because it’s real life. Reds president Phil Castellini — who in April 2022 responded to questions about ownership’s commitment to winning by asking, “Well, where you gonna go?” and saying new owners would move the team — this month reappeared at a fan group luncheon to seek sympathy over the supposed lack of profit margins.

As reported by The Athletic and documented by several attendees on Twitter, Castellini — whose father, Bob, is the Reds’ principal owner — claimed the team “operates like a nonprofit.” Setting aside the minor detail that no one is allowed to sell, say, the American Red Cross for a billion dollars, as Castellini’s family could absolutely choose to do with the Cincinnati Reds, his claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny on an annual profit and loss level.

Baseball writer Joe Sheehan calculated that the Reds are guaranteed…

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