When Junior brought baseball back to the Queen City

By foxsports
Published

Still going through the nuggets in Hal McCoy's new book, available to the hoi polloi next month, and wanted to mention this one about when the Reds traded for Ken Griffey Jr., then signed him to a new nine-year, $116.5 million contract (that was a lot of money back then!) ...

As Dave Cameron pointed out just last year, that trade was a steal for the Mariners and would have been a steal even if Griffey had been productive and healthy for the life of the nine-year contract he signed shortly after joining the Reds.

Which of course he wasn't.

I couldn't help wondering what McCoy actually wrote about Griffey when everything went down. Fortunately, the Dayton Daily News is one of the few papers that maintains a free archive going back a significant number of years. So...

There's also a long quote from Bowden in McCoy's column, but nothing like "Baseball is back in Cincinnati." I'm not saying Bowden never said that. I'm just saying I can't find the quote in any of McCoy's columns.

Of course the deal didn't work out, but nobody at the time had any discouraging words. Not among people in Cincinnati who mattered, anyway.

I should mention that there had been some problems in Cincinnati. In 1995, the Reds were stuck with a ridiculous number of empty seats in the playoffs. On the other hand, that same year the Reds ranked sixth in the National League in home attendance, pretty tremendous considering Cincinnati was (and is) one of the smallest markets in the majors. In 1999, the Reds' raw attendance had actually risen quite a bit, but they'd fallen in the league tables to just 11th.

And in 2000, with Junior? Attemdance jumped more than 25 percent. But the whole league was up, so they improved from 11th to just 10th in the league. And at least some of that raw increase was certainly due to the high expectations after the 96-win 1999 season. But of course they didn't win with Griffey. And except for a nifty bump in 2003 that I can't explain, attendance quickly went into the doldrums and stayed there.

Even though it didn't work out, Griffey's contract was perfectly fine. With much of the money deferred, he gave his hometown club a huge hometown discount. But trading a young Mike Cameron for a middle-aged (by baseball standards) Ken Griffey didn't make sense then, even if nobody seemed to realize it at the time.