THE BROO VIEW with Ken Broo

Good Morning!

There are other stories this week. The Bengals are still waiting to sign their number one draft pick, Brett Favre and the Packers have a Monday deadline to work out their differences or the commissioner will step in, the Olympics are about to begin. But around here, there has been no bigger story, than the trade of Ken Griffey, Junior.

As quickly as the deal fell together back in the winter of 2000, it fell apart at the same speed this week. I’m told Walt Jocketty was taken completely by surprise, when his counterpart with the White Sox inquired about Junior. I’m told, Ken Williams called Jocketty to inquire about a trade involving a Reds relief pitcher. When Williams casually inquired about Junior, Jocketty let it be known in no uncertain terms, Griffey was available. Then, all that was left to haggle over, was the price. And with that, the Griffey era was over.

It’s clear, the Reds wanted Junior out of here. They may tell you differently, but the facts don’t lie. They’re paying half of the eight million dollars that remain on Junior’s active contract. It may be more than that, because one report had the White Sox only paying the pro rate Major League minimum on the balance of Junior’s contract this season, not the two million that was reported. But whatever the dollar amount is, whenever a team pays another team to take a player, they don’t want that player anymore. The Reds didn’t want Junior anymore.

Maybe it was just a jump start on the inevitable. For sure, Griffey was out of here at the end of the season, regardless.

It left a lot of us in the media to wonder, where did it all go wrong? At the end of his Reds life, Junior was a shell of the player the Reds traded for in February of 2000. His swing was all arms, his speed had left his legs, his Gold Glove had turned to lead. The worst enemy any athlete has, is time. Time robs you of skills. Griffey was fleeced. But the point of where it went wrong wasn’t this week, or last or even last year. It was a long time before that. It really happened the night of that theatrical event the Reds called a news conference back in February of 2000….February 10th, actually.

On that night, the Reds committed to spend 119-million on Griffey, and little on anyone else. Look at who the Reds surrounded Griffey with. Sore armed pitchers like Pete Harnisch, Joey Hamilton, Jimmy Haynes. Chris Stynes, Alex Ochoa, DT Cromer. That wasn’t a team, it was a collection of spare parts.

And worse, we now told, then general manager Jim Bowden was ordered to dump salary after added Junior, not build around him.

Pick the greatest player in the history of the Big Red Machine. Now extract every one of the others who made up that terrific team, except ‘that’ guy. What do you think you’d have. We found out about that around here, didn’t we. You can ask Johnny Bench about it.

Yes, Griffey was injured, a lot during his time in Cincinnati. But how? Doing what? Did he throw his back out dancing? Cut himself with a knife slicing food? Or did he get hurt simply trying to make plays?

Look, I’m not here today to try and make a case for you changing your mind about Ken Griffey, Junior. You’ve made your mind up. If you’re happy to see him go and soured on him while he was here, nothing that I’m going to say today is going to change your mind. But as I’ve often said, on this show, on these air waves, nothing happens in sports, in life, in a vacuum.

Baseball may be a sport based on individual accomplishment. But it’s a team sport. If you bat third, you better have someone in front of and behind you who can hit, or you won’t see many good pitches. If you play center, you better have guys on either side of you who can help cut down on the amount of turf you have to cover. If you want to contend for championships, you better not change general managers like socks, or managers like t-shirts. For the record, Junior had five GM’s in his nine years here and six managers. Find me a teams with that kind of turnover that wins a pennant.

Ken Griffey Junior arrived here with great fanfare and great promise, one of the top 50 players in baseball, all time. He left town with no fanfare, just a press release from the Reds that he’d been traded. He arrived young, he left old. And in the middle not a whole lot happened to put the Reds on Major League Baseball’s championship radar. Blame him if you want, but at least examine the facts. In a lot of ways, the guy never had to a chance to be what you or he wanted.