Thompson finds his calling: Boyd County graduate plays pivotal role for Reds
Jul. 13—CINCINNATI — Bo Thompson hasn't seen a Cincinnati Reds game with his own two eyes since early 2016, so don't bother looking for him at Great American Ball Park when the team is on the field.
Thompson is, however, usually there, and always watching.
Keep an eye on Reds manager David Bell. If he's on the top step in the part of the dugout closest to home plate, raising his hand slightly as if to ask the umpire to hold on for a moment and glancing over his shoulder toward bench coach Freddie Benavides on one of the three phones in the dugout, Thompson is hard at work.
Thompson, a 2007 Boyd County graduate, is Cincinnati's manager of advance scouting. During Reds games, home and away, he sits in an office off the clubhouse lined with monitors and scrutinizes every play of every game. Thompson combs through video replays from each available angle and advises Bell, through Benavides, if Cincinnati should challenge a play.
Thompson combines quick thinking, quick analysis and quick-dialing fingers with a blanket-like knowledge of the rule book.
Managers are allotted 10 seconds to hold up the game and 10 more seconds to decide if they want to challenge or not, with the clock starting immediately after an umpire's call of safe, out or "time." So Thompson doesn't have time to look up a rule — once he verifies what he sees on one of the three monitors at his desk, he has to know already if what he's seen is legal, if the umpire's call is correct and if the play can even be challenged.
"I guess the first thing is, I never assume that (umpires) get the call right," Thompson said. "The umpires are great and they rarely miss anything, but I just never assume that it's right. So the first thing I do is I just try to watch the play back immediately, and if it's not super obvious, then I usually try to find another angle that shows the play more clearly. We usually have time to watch two or three (replays) by the time we make a decision."
'My way to contribute'With significant assistance from Thompson, Bell had the best record in the National League in replay challenges in 2021, with 76.9% of calls he challenged being overturned. Entering the Reds' home game with the Mets on July 5, half of Bell's 20 challenges have resulted in overturned calls in 2022.
"It's my way to contribute to what's happening on the field," Thompson said. "The players, I just want them to be recognized for what they've done. When they make a play, I want to make sure that that gets recognized or called correctly. It's their statistics. They're the ones making it happen. But I just want to make sure that it counts properly."
That is probably the best-known of Thompson's roles with the Reds — the (Cincinnati) Enquirer and The Athletic have published stories on his replay prowess — but only part of his actual duties. and not by accident.
"I trust him with anything and everything, to the point of, he has his main jobs, but I actually do include him in a lot more," Bell said. "I really value his perspective and I love getting his opinion and what he's seeing. It's from a different angle, but more importantly than that, I trust him because he cares so much that he puts so much thought into everything and he's got so much to offer."
Thompson exerts that effort for each of the Reds' 162 games — he thinks the last one he didn't work was on June 2, 2016, when they were in Colorado before he began traveling with the team — so Thompson is wherever Cincinnati is playing but never actually watching it in person.
He is instead harnessing fanatical attention to detail and well-honed competitiveness that are easily recognizable to people who have known Thompson since his youth.
Thompson was one of Boyd County's best cross country runners in recent memory until 2022 graduate JB Terrill came along, according to the Lions' coach of the era, Shawn Thornbury. That was due to an intricate training regimen and a hard-nosed mentality that showed itself in Thompson's final cross country race, the 2006 Class 3A state meet at the Kentucky Horse Park.
Thompson, who had been ranked 13th entering the region meet in the state's largest classification, encountered a unique and unexpected challenge about a quarter of a mile into the race, as Thornbury remembers it. A dog got loose and made for a pack of runners.
"Bo has to stop because the dog runs in front of him," Thornbury said, "and when he stopped, a guy stepped on the back of his shoe and pulls his shoe off."
Thompson didn't stop to grouse nor to put his shoe back on.
That would, after all, slow him down, conflicting with what has become a trademark sense of urgency.
"And he ran his entire senior state meet with one shoe, and still I think he ran under 18 minutes with one shoe on," Thornbury, laughing uproariously at the memory, said.
(He remembered that correctly — Thompson finished in 17:59.84.)
Filling a nicheFor Thompson, professional sports wasn't a faraway concept. He grew up in the same Briarwood subdivision in Boyd County that is still home to major league umpire Greg Gibson and where former NFL player Marty Moore lived when Thompson was a kid.
Playing professional sports, however, based on raw physicality was likely always a long shot. Thompson was listed at 5-foot-7 and 110 pounds in high school and never played baseball past the Babe Ruth youth level.
So Thompson found another way to make himself indispensable: a mastery of the rulebook.
"As somebody who's not the most physically gifted or talented," Thompson said, grinning wryly, "you gotta find every edge you can, and sometimes knowing the rules is that edge."
Thompson realized that could be a career-advantageous asset in 2014 when Major League Baseball instituted instant replay. At the time an intern in the Reds front office, he boned up on the intricacies of the rules.
"That was when I really started to dive in and just say, hey, I need to know this stuff forwards and backwards," Thompson said. "It's interesting, something comes up pretty much every night where you're like, 'Oh, I need to know that.'"
Thompson much more often than not does know it. He was thus promoted from baseball operations analyst to manager of major league video operations in 2015, and again to manager of advance scouting in 2019.
Owing to those additional responsibilities, on the morning of July 5, about nine hours before the Reds hosted the Mets in the second of a three-game series, Thompson had notes on Cincinnati's makeup doubleheader with the Pirates scheduled for two days later up on one monitor in his workspace. That particular week was unusual in that it also featured the beginning of a series with the Rays that Friday.
"A lot of quick turnarounds this week," Thompson said.
That further complicated a process that already requires juggling the immediate and the future.
"Early in the day, it's a lot of work on the next series," Thompson said, "and then usually in the afternoon, once we get the lineup for that day's game, it transitions more into, all right, focus on tonight's game for a little bit. and then usually there's about a 30- to 40-minute period before the game where I might be able to come back to it and work on the next series."
Once that information is gathered, Thompson and his coworkers provide it to players and coaches and communicate with the front office and database development teams, he said.
Thompson has adjusted to the additional workload well enough that Bell is already looking for more things for him to do.
"I'm just gonna keep trying to increase his role as much as possible," the Reds manager said. "The problem is, everyone sees Bo like that, so he's by far the busiest guy in the building. He's got a ton to do every day, and he handles it really well."
Power of positivityThe difficulty the Reds have had on the field this season — even though they improved their record to 33-54 with a five-game winning streak and a ninth-inning comeback victory at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night — hasn't particularly made his job harder, Thompson said.
Thompson identifies Sept. 25, 2020 — the night Cincinnati clinched a playoff berth with a 7-2 win over the Twins in Minneapolis — as "definitely the high point of being here," he said. But he has found positives from a 2022 year with more losses than anyone in Reds Country would care for.
One example he cited: the Reds' response to being one-hit in a 4-1 loss to the Braves on July 2, and having no hits through six innings the next day against the defending World Series champions.
"Luis Castillo kept us in the game; we ended up scoring to take the lead in that game; the Braves came back to tie it, and we ended up walking it off," Thompson said by way of recapping the 4-3 Cincinnati win.
"The relentlessness, the resiliency of the team has really been impressive. It's like, no quit; they just kept going. That's what makes it fun.
"Every year's hard. Can't win every game. Even the best teams only win 60% of their games. It's just been really fun to watch these guys play hard every night."
It matches the effort shown by a five-tool asset who never sees the field — figuratively or literally — but is in the middle of it, as much as he can handle.
"It's not surprising that a person with his skill set would be successful in sports," Thornbury said, "when you take the time to put attention to detail and really focus on the stuff that matters, and he's always been able to do that. Of course, he's shown it in his current career path."
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