By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service

It looked like the French Revolution as the heads began to roll. The general manager. The manager. Two coaches. The Monday morning massacre.

Then came the game, where pitching is always more important than anybody in an office. This day the Reds won. More often, they haven't.

Jim Bowden and Bob Boone have left the building, but let us dispense with a mathematical fact of life, no matter who takes their jobs.

A team on a budget can contend in Major League Baseball. Find Oakland in the standings. Or Kansas City. Or Minnesota.

But not when a third of the payroll goes to two players, and on July 28 those two players have combined for 14 home runs and 41 RBI. Which is the output of Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Larkin.

Where other small market wannabes spread their resources - especially on pitching - the Reds invested $21 million this season in a couple of glittering names with famous bats. It hasn't worked.

The Reds, having gone down a dangerous road for a smaller-market team, are a failed experiment.

Maybe if Griffey had been less brittle and Larkin had less age ... but you can't blame them, really. Nobody wants to get hurt, or older.

But their salaries have put a chokehold on the Reds' ability to maneuver. All sides have failed - be it stars who have been unable to produce like stars, or a front office that has been unable to develop starting pitching or unwilling to buy it.

That is where all comparisons end with the A's, Twins, Royals, et al.

"Everything's always been his fault, which goes with the territory," Aaron Boone was saying of his father, having played a fine game at third base the same day his dad was canned. "I think the problems run a lot deeper."

So the blade drops on the bosses, as it must. And the Reds today stand as a warning to other small market teams.

Go this way, at your peril.

Griffey's move here from Seattle was cheered. Now, the cost of the gamble is clear. It is not so much his failing, as the strategy of his signing. Cincinnati is 39 games under .500 since then. The Mariners, by the way, are 136 games over.

Bowden, and the Reds, may have been looking for salvation in the wrong place.

Better to have splurged on pitching.

"How you best spend the dollars you do have is what's important," team president John Allen said as he announced Monday's casualty list.

Bowden was once thought a boy wonder. Now he leaves as someone thought flighty, maybe a little slippery. This is what happens when you lose.

The book on Bob Boone is that he is a first-class fellow with an exasperating flaw - the tendency to tinker.

Over-managing is not necessarily fatal, but then there was the sloppy side of the Reds. They lead the civilized world in errors - No. 100 came Monday - and have a nasty habit of brain lock. The sorts of things that get put on the desk of the manager.

But no manager ever born could win with a pitching staff earned run average of 5.38.

So on a cloudy day, the guillotine went to work, and now the high command is filled by temps.

The Reds were hosting Philadelphia in a one-game series, a rain makeup before nearly empty stands. The winning run was scored by Boone, who was toasting bread for breakfast when his father told him he had been fired.

"A surreal day," Boone called it.

But here is what's real: The Reds have a lot to fix, and the hard part is finding ways to fix them.