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Bobby Nightengale, Cincinnati Enquirer

The Associated Press

Scott Boras, agent to the stars and more full of himself than should be legally allowed, says baseball is suffering from a “competitive cancer’’ that makes short-term losing acceptable. If your team can’t win big, it might as well lose big and get a higher 1st-round draft pick. Some might call that tanking.

It’s not a new theory, and it’s not wrong. There really is no incentive to win half the time. To be almost good. The Reds haven’t exactly aspired to the more perfect 81-81 in the past five years. Why should they?

Boras blames the game’s attendance slide – below 70 million paying fans for the first time in 15 years – on bad teams whose fans have tired of watching bad teams. Sound like any team, you know?

Sam Greene

Maybe Scott Boras could do his part to cure the "cancer," instead of just pontificating on it. Matt Harvey is one of his clients. Maybe Boras should convince Harvey to sign a 1-year deal with the Reds for the major-league minimum of $545,000. That’d allow our little club to spend the saved $7 million or so on another mediocre starting pitcher. It’s possible Boras wouldn’t like that idea.

At least Boras wasn’t offensive. Deputy MLB commissioner Dan Halem didn’t intend to be offensive, either. At least I hope he didn’t. But read this and tell me if he didn’t come off that way around here:

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“I don’t — and our owners don’t — believe that there’s any connections between the rebuilding process and overall attendance,’’ Halem said. “There’s a variety of reasons for our attendance numbers. We had poor weather. The commissioner is heavily focused on that issue, but we don’t view a connection between the rebuilding process and attendance.”

The Associated Press

It could be hard to see Cincinnati from Park Avenue, sure. And being out of touch is an occupational hazard when you work in Manhattan, NYC. But to suggest fans don’t mind paying to watch their teams lose is disrespectful to small-market fans. Maybe if someone dragged commissioner Rob Manfred and his underlings out of their Yankees-Red Sox-Northeast-corridor cocoon, they might see how baseball really works here in Flyover Country.

I recall Manfred’s visit to Cincinnati two summers ago. I asked him if MLB had any concerns that pro soccer might be eating into his game’s gate receipts. Manfred looked at me like I was from Cincinnati or something. He replied that baseball had no such concerns. OK, boss. Whatever you say. FC Cincinnati loved that answer.

Halem blames bad weather, but the two teams with the most severe attendance collapse – Toronto and Miami – play in domes. Halem denies the connection between “the rebuilding process’’ (i.e. losing a lot) and low attendance. Does that mean that losing should produce bigger crowds? Finish 50-112, pack the place. Is Halem listening to what he’s saying?

Here’s how it works in Cincinnati, gentlemen:

The Reds had their lowest attendance since 1984. In the past five years, the Reds have finished last in the NL Central four times, and are a cumulative 124 games under .500 during those years. Wanna know why that is?

(Hint: It’s not because it rained a lot.)

It’s the losing, stupid.

It’s the perception that the Reds, who haven’t contended for five years, won’t contend for another five. It’s the notion the Reds are professional re-builders. It’s the skepticism fortified by baseball’s rich-man-poor-man economics, and the idea that for every year the Reds are relevant, there will be three years they are not, because the players that made them relevant won’t stick around. It has been this way here and elsewhere, all over Flyover Country, for 20 years. Believe it or not, the monsoons haven’t visited us every year since 1998.

As Boras said, “For the first time in our game, we’ve got eight teams that have finished with 95 losses and three teams with over 100 losses. The fans just don’t want to see it.’’

Albert Cesare,

It’s also this:

Your game is boring to anyone under the age of 30. You know what’s not boring to the younger people you so desperately need? Soccer. You know what’s making life harder for the Cincinnati Reds? Soccer.

Baseball plods along. Its infatuation with metrics has made watching a manager think as important as watching players play. You go, Craig Counsell! Wake me when you’re done making that third pitching change in the bottom of the 6th.

Baseball covets young fans, yet schedules its showcase event so half that audience is into deep REM sleep by the middle of the 5th. Baseball can’t get its games in under three hours. With the analytics-inspired approach to pitching, that’s only going to get worse.