I’ve developed a new obsession. It started in the winter of 2024, but went up a level over the past several months. That’s sort of my thing– I tend to develop fixations.

My latest one? Being an armchair general manager for my favorite baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds.

As I psychoanalyze myself about this, a couple things come to mind:

• I LOVE the Reds. My grandfather was from Cincinnati and would listen to Reds games on an old radio from his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where I also grew up. He passed his Reds fandom down to my brother and I, and I’ve followed the team closely since I was around 10 years old. I so badly want to see them win a World Series in my lifetime. (The last time they did was in 1990. The year before I was born. Harumph.)
  
  
• I also love sports video games, especially MLB The Show. Sometimes, being the Reds’ GM and making trades, free agent signings and other roster moves is more fun for me than playing actual games within, well, the game.

Until recently, however, this virtual wheeling-and-dealing only happened when I played said video game. The seeds of the next stage of my obsession date back to 2022, when an account I follow on Twitter – or X, whatever – posted a Google sheet template where you can “choose your own adventure” for the then-Reds’ offseason. The account holder gave open access to the template so anyone could play around with it. I really just admired the idea from afar for a while. 

Last winter, when actual-President of Baseball Operations Nick Krall eventually spent the most money on free agents that the Reds had in years, I started writing out offseason ideas in the yellow notes app on my phone. Fast-forward to a few months ago – when the Reds’ 2024 season wasn’t even over yet, mind you – and I was already thinking about ideas to fix the team amid a disappointing year. I realized that I had to start being more realistic about the team’s self-imposed payroll limitations, and that’s hard to do in a phone note or even a Google doc. Then I remembered the spreadsheet template. I made a copy of it and started playing around. Dozens of plans/tabs later (sadly not joking), here I am writing this.

If one thing is clear to me with all these make-believe trades and free agent signings I’ve swung in the Google sheet over the past few months, it’s that I’d be a TERRIBLE general manager. Not necessarily because my ideas are so bad. (Although certainly many of them are.) It’s because I just cannot commit. Just about every day when I have some free time, I come up with a new framework for the Reds’ 2025 offseason using that handy-dandy template. More often than not, I play these plans out in MLB The Show to see how the team I’ve constructed “feels” virtually. But, like clockwork, I’m back to the drawing board within a few days. I’ll come to terms with a reason (or a few) why my latest plan was unrealistic or just not quite right. 

It’s, honestly, exhausting. And I’m just doing this for fun. I couldn’t imagine running an actual team, trading actual human beings for other human beings and then worrying about having regrets the next day. The thing about managing a sports franchise is you generally don’t get mulligans. 

As I write this, the MLB offseason has finally begun and the Reds made some moves today – actual moves, not just ones I typed out in fantasy land. They brought back left-handed reliever Brent Suter, let go of veterans like catcher Luke Maile and first baseman Ty France, and saw pitchers Nick Martinez and Jake Junis exercise opt-outs. This is just the beginning, and hopefully, some free agent signings and trade acquisitions will happen soon. I can’t wait to follow along.

As I consider resuscitating this blog – which was at one point solely dedicated to the Reds and later, somehow, transformed into a cooking and restaurant reviews platform – at some point I’ll probably dive more deeply into some of my ideas for the team’s offseason. Perhaps I’ll explore and write about just what it was about the 2024 season that made me take my armchair GM-ing up a notch. 

But for now, I’ll surf over to another open Google Chrome tab and cook up my next plan for getting my beloved Reds back to the promised land.