The Cincinnati Reds: Baseball’s Global Emblem of Glorious Failure
CINCINNATI—From a distance of 7,000 km, the Cincinnati Reds look less like a baseball franchise and more like a controlled experiment in how much nostalgia a single city can inhale before developing a collective pulmonary embolism. Here, on the banks of the Ohio, locals still speak of the 1975-76 “Big Red Machine” the way Sicilians whisper of the plague: with reverence, terror, and the quiet certainty that nothing will ever be that lethal again.
To the rest of the planet, a team that has not won a playoff series since 1995 is what anthropologists term a “living fossil”—like the coelacanth, only with worse bullpen numbers. Yet the Reds persist, a scarlet-threaded reminder that America will subsidize any misery if you slap a logo on it and sell a $14 plastic cup.
Globally, the club’s ineptitude is oddly reassuring. While European football fans torch city centers after a dodgy VAR call, Cincinnarians merely sigh, update their “maybe next century” memes, and return to their three-way chili, a dish that itself tastes of resigned acceptance. The Reds are Exhibit A in the argument that democracy sometimes gets the baseball team it deserves: a .420 winning percentage that doubles as an Ohio zip code.
International investors—yes, they exist—watch the Reds the way vultures watch a wounded antelope. The franchise valuation has still quadrupled since 2010, proving that you can monetize mediocrity if you wrap it in retro branding and a stadium named after a bank that paid a $9 billion fine for mortgage fraud. Somewhere in Singapore, a portfolio manager who’s never seen a double play is long on $ROTO, the fantasy-scout ETF, because American despair is the one commodity that never enters a bear market.
Meanwhile, Latin American academies keep shipping teenage shortstops to this inland sea of disappointment. The kids land at CVG airport clutching dreams and a Duolingo vocabulary—“slider,”“release,”“waivers”—only to discover that Riverfront nightlife consists of two closed Hooters and a bourbon bar that carded Pete Rose. They phone home: Mamá, the infield grass is gorgeous, but the city feels like it’s being gently dissolved by time. Still, any escape from Venezuela’s collapse is worth a bus ride through Louisville.
Across the Pacific, Japanese fans stream games at 8 a.m. local, not because the product is compelling but because the tragedy is exquisite—like watching a kabuki where every protagonist strikes out looking. NHK aired a documentary titled “The Art of Losing Gracefully,” featuring a Reds super-fan who has attended 1,200 losses since 1982. The segment closed with him folding his scorebook into an origami crane and setting it afloat on the Ohio, which promptly swallowed it, because even the river wants no part of this narrative.
Europeans, distracted by their own relegation battles, view the Reds as a cautionary tale of what happens when you refuse to relegate anyone. MLB’s revenue-sharing is socialism for billionaires: the worse you play, the more luxury-tax loot you pocket. It’s the sort of welfare state that would make Stockholm blush, yet American pundits still insist the sport embodies frontier meritocracy.
And so the world spins, glaciers retreat, supply chains snap, but every summer the Reds return, like a seasonal depression you can set your atomic clock to. Their global significance is precisely that they have none—an anti-miracle allowing every other civilization to feel superior for at least nine innings. Ukrainians under missile fire can mutter, “At least we’re not 14-32.” Sudanese refugees can huddle around short-wave radios and hear the final score from Milwaukee, then laugh the hollow laugh of people who realize geography is the only difference between their despair and Ohio’s.
In the end, the Cincinnati Reds are the planet’s most honest monument: a publicly funded mausoleum to the human talent for turning peanuts, Cracker Jack, and chronic underachievement into a $1.4 billion asset. Come for the nostalgia, stay because you’ve mistaken inertia for hope. And when the last out is recorded, exit through the team shop—where, for only thirty-five American dollars, you too can wear the cap that says to the world: I survived, and all I got was this lousy century.
