This was the sad state of baseball affairs in Cincinnati on Monday. And by lunch, it had cost GM Jim Bowden and manager Bob Boone their jobs.

There were indications that team COO John Allen and CEO Carl Lindner had been anxious to fire Bowden for some time. In fact, one former Reds employee suggested recently that Bowden was being "set up" to get fired.

He'd had at least four trades vetoed by ownership in the last two years -- including monster deals last summer that would have brought the Reds big names like Bartolo Colon, Chuck Finley and Scott Rolen. Allen didn't address those names directly Monday. He said simply that some of Bowden's proposed deals were "so absurd" (because of the money the Reds would have taken on) that it made no sense to approve them. Of course, the "absurdity" was in the eye of the beholder.

It's actually believed that not much more than a week before Bowden was fired, ownership had shot down yet another trade that would have sent reliever Gabe White to the Yankees. Yet just a few days later, White's name was on a list of four players that Allen told Bowden he all but had to deal by Thursday's trade deadline. (The others are believed to be fellow pitchers Scott Williamson, Danny Graves and Scott Sullivan.)

And that was in keeping with constant tension between the GM and his bosses over payroll issues that never seemed to go away, even after the doors of the Great American Ballpark opened this spring.

On one hand, Bowden was asked to win. On the other, he was never given the resources to piece together a respectable pitching staff to complement his great young nucleus of position players. Just in the four seasons Ken Griffey Jr. has been around, the Reds have ripped through 31 different starting pitchers. And only four (Jimmy Haynes, Elmer Dessens, Steve Parris and Ron Villone) won more than 10 games in any of those seasons. So the Yankees they weren't.

Not that Bowden didn't have some issues that contributed to his demise. He did. There was no doubt about that.

As brilliant and creative as he could be, he was disliked by many -- if not most -- of his fellow GMs for his cocky (sometimes abrasive) nature. And that sentiment didn't always stop at the Cincinnati city line. As one NL executive put it Monday, "I heard him bad-mouthed as much inside his organization as outside."

Rightly or wrongly, Bowden also had non-baseball issues that clearly contributed to his firing. He was recently involved in a messy divorce that spilled over into the newspapers. There have been rumblings for some time that that would eventually lead him to the unemployment line when his contract expired after this season, if not before.

On one hand, (Jim) Bowden was asked to win. On the other, he was never given the resources to piece together a respectable pitching staff to complement his great young nucleus of position players.

There will be a long list of candidates for his permanent successor but there have been rumblings recently that Allen had begun asking around baseball about two potential GMs -- Braves assistant GM Frank Wren (who comes from Cincinnati) and Tigers assistant GM Al Avila.

Boone, meanwhile, had his own issues. In six seasons as a big-league manager, in Kansas City and Cincinnati, he never has had a winning season. And the Reds, under his watch, were never exactly known as the most disciplined club in the league.

"I always thought they looked like they were in a highly disorganized state," said one NL scout. "Guys seemed to do whatever they wanted. There didn't seem to be much team concept when it came to stretching, batting practice, infield."

Boone was also the guy who went to lunch last winter with Phil Nevin, whom the Reds were trying to get from San Diego for Griffey, in an attempt to persuade Nevin to drop his no-trade clause and come to Cincinnati. But word of that meeting leaked out before the Reds had presented this potential scenario to Griffey. And that created an irreparable rift between the manager and the biggest name in his clubhouse.

Boone also had issues with his pitching staff, particularly after his two-week experiment with a four-man rotation turned into a massive debacle this month. After Graves won his first start on short rest, Reds starters then won two of their next 12 starts. By the time the Reds finally abandoned the four-man rotation after the All-Star break, their season was essentially over.

But for weeks, even months, before all that, Boone knew he was in trouble. He'd been hearing the rumors of his impending firing for so long, in fact, that there were indications he actually told Allen that if he was going to get canned anyway, it was better for everyone if they did it now.

Nevertheless, you can make a case that this wasn't either Boone's or Bowden's fault. They worked for an ownership with tighter fists than Lennox Lewis. For the past six years, the Reds' payroll had lurked among the 10 lowest in baseball -- until this year, when it climbed to 13th-lowest.

That made both the GM's job and the manager's job a nonstop juggling act. The GM wanted to trade Barry Larkin years ago. Lindner instead handed him a $9-million-a-year contract.

The GM then traded for Griffey, knowing he had a new ballpark on the way that would, theoretically, make Griffey affordable. Instead, Lindner kept telling the GM which players to get rid of instead of which players to chase.

The result was that the GM was saddled with a roster in which two aging, decreasingly productive players were gobbling up about 40 percent of his payroll. So a franchise that once may have been the most stable in baseball predictably turned into one of the most unstable.

Was there ever a spring training in which the Reds didn't bring 60 or 70 players to camp, hoping to get lucky on one or two of them? Not in recent memory, there wasn't.

And that meant the list of players who passed through Cincinnati for a year and then moved on was longer than Pete Rose's old pass list: Ron Gant, Greg Vaughn, Terry Pendleton, Dante Bichette, Juan Encarnacion, Benito Santiago, Ruben Rivera, Ruben Sierra. And that was just the hitters.

The parade of pitchers Bowden had run through his clubhouse would stretch from home plate to Fountain Square: Denny Neagle, Joey Hamilton, Brian Moehler, Shawn Estes, Osvaldo Fernandez, Pete Schourek, Mike Morgan, Derek Lilliquist, Xavier Hernandez, Ricky Bones, Jason Bere, Rick Krivda, Juan Guzman, Bruce Chen, Jose Silva and Pete Harnisch just about every other year.

They came. They went. Some pitched great. Some pitched lousy. Some got traded. Some got released. But over the last five years, only three Reds starters managed to win at least 10 games in back-to-back seasons: Harnisch, Dessens and Parris.

Somehow, though, Bowden always seemed to find one or two low-budget gems a year -- just enough to stay reasonably competitive, until this year. This year, the Reds have scored plenty of runs (more than five teams with winning records, in fact), but they're 29th in the big leagues in ERA, and have given up nearly 270 more runs than the Dodgers.

Of course, it wasn't the preference of either the GM or the manager to run this kind of staff out there. But they were given no choice -- and told to win, anyway. And when they didn't, what happened to them is what always happens: Ready, aim, fire.

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.