It was rough. It was painful. The day-to-day losing was, at times, soul crushing. From 2015-2018 the Cincinnati Reds lost a lot of baseball games. The losing began, not as rebuilding, but as a “reboot” or a “retool”, but definitely not a “rebuild”. And it seems like that was actually the plan. The team made trades with the near-term future in mind. Several of those trades that were made, however, didn’t work out for one reason or another.
That reboot quickly turned into a full-on rebuild. The team looked to look into the future rather than into the present.