Could you just see Carl Lindner swooning during O'Brien's second interview? O'Brien grew up in Ohio. His wife graduated from Miami, he got a graduate degree at Ohio U. Golly gee, the guy spent his youth coming down with his pop from Columbus, to watch the Reds of the 1970s.

His dad was a baseball lifer. Dan "worked on grounds crews, sold peanuts and did laundry" as the O'Brien family passed through such baseball map-dots as Boise, Idaho; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Louisville. Young Dan pulled himself up by his bootstraps. You have to figure all of that made Uncle Carl's heart go pitter-pat.

What all this has to do with O'Brien's ability to deliver the lately comical Reds from their recent selves is open to debate.

Did you know that, during their grand interview process, the Reds didn't bother talking to anyone with the Oakland A's? Does that surprise you? It surprised the A's. They're only the most successful small-market franchise since we started making that distinction. Nobody got a call out there. Maybe nobody with that franchise watched the Reds as a kid.

O'Brien wants to home-grow talent. Who doesn't? What team, besides the Yankees, doesn't want to scout, draft, sign and develop its own players? It's cheaper that way. Plus, it has proven to be effective, as the Florida Marlins just proved.

O'Brien says "it starts and ends with starting pitching." Again, who disputes that? The fact that O'Brien was with the Texas Rangers for the past seven years and the Rangers have been as good at growing their own starters as the Reds apparently was not a consideration in the decision-making process.

The Rangers

To be fair, the Rangers had a win-now philosophy during O'Brien's term as assistant GM there, and a rich, loopy owner, Tom Hicks, who spent a quarter-billion on a shortstop. O'Brien cites the Houston Astros as a model for the Reds. He cites Houston's home-grown success, yet he had no hand in finding or developing Houston's best starters, Wade Miller and Roy Oswalt, or closer Billy Wagner. Plus, Houston has a few players who'd bust the Reds little budget in a Texas minute.

Nothing personal, but this exercise is a shrug until we understand what ownership means by dedication to building from within. Are they going to let O'Brien hire good scouts and pay them the going rate? Are they going to ensure that top draft picks will be signed?

Will they expand the Reds' presence in Latin America? Will they allow O'Brien to expense his dry cleaning on the road? Can he make long distance calls from his hotel room?

You have to spend money somewhere, if you want to be anything grander than the Brewers. If you are going to carry an anemic major league payroll, you better be spending millions on scouting, drafting, signing and developing kids.

Here's a suggestion

Take some of that $6 million you're deferring from Junior Griffey's salary and spend it on player development instead of mutual funds.

At his news conference Monday, 49-year-old O'Brien struck me as a younger Bob Quinn: A smooth, gentlemanly, philosophically conservative baseball lifer. He's willing to take this job without knowing how much he can spend on his team. "We discussed generic payroll parameters" was how O'Brien described it. He said he'd had "considerable discussion" with the team's braintrust about developing an international program.

He asks the fans to be patient. He knows rooting for this club is like sitting in traffic. Eventually, you're going to get where you want to be. After their bungled debut year in Pretty Good American Ball Park, the Reds are the orange barrels of the National League.

What O'Brien doesn't know for sure is the financial commitment ownership will make to fix the bad road the team is on now. Until everyone gets that word, the whole thing is revving in neutral. Dan O'Brien's at the wheel. Congratulations to him. I suppose.

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E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com

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