The Reds have spent the last year and a half trying to change the face of the dugout, but the results keep pointing somewhere else.
David Bell was dismissed on September 22, 2024 after Cincinnati fell short of the playoffs for a fourth straight season. The move didn’t exactly spark a wave of grief around the fan base, and the club moved quickly to Terry Francona, a future Hall of Famer, to manage the team entering 2025. Francona got the Reds back into the postseason in his first year, but that run ended after just two games, and the hope around Cincinnati was that 2026 would be the season the Reds finally made a real October push.
That hasn’t happened. The Reds are now 12 games under .500 and 26 games behind the NL Central champion Milwaukee Brewers. After Sunday’s 9-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs, Barry Larkin didn’t sugarcoat it on the broadcast: "We are so, so far behind.”
It was a familiar kind of comment from the Hall of Fame shortstop. Less than three years ago, before Bell was let go, Larkin had already made it clear he viewed the team’s 2024 showing as mediocre. And that’s where the bigger picture starts to sharpen: swapping managers has not changed the underlying problem.
This is not a full-throated defense of Bell, who had his share of misfires during his time in charge. But Francona inherited a roster similar to the one Bell had, and the improvement was modest at best. Cincinnati went from 77 wins in 2024 to 83 wins in 2025.
Even that small bump may not hold. Francona is in danger of finishing with fewer than 77 wins this season, and the Reds would need to go 5-1 over their final six games just to reach that mark. If you leave out the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and the rebuilding year in 2022, Francona could end up with fewer wins than Bell’s first season in Cincinnati, when the Reds won 75 games in 2019.
The real issue, at least from the way the season has played out, sits higher up the chain. President of baseball operations Nick Krall has held the decision-making power since replacing Dick Williams in 2020, and that’s where the focus lands now, along with ownership, which has its own part in this mess.
Bell managed 865 games in Cincinnati and finished 409-456, a .473 winning percentage. Francona is 155-163 through his first two seasons with the Reds, a .462 mark.
For a future Hall of Fame manager, that’s not the kind of record anyone expected. And if the numbers tell the story plainly, the conclusion is just as blunt: it wasn’t Tito’s fault.
And it wasn’t Bell’s fault either.
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