“I want to be in position to win a championship. I’m not strong-arming anybody, but that’s the way it is,” Ken Griffey Jr. told USA Today earlier this week. The only thing less surprising than Griffey letting it be known that he wouldn’t mind playing for a winner was Cincinnati Reds general manager Walt Jocketty’s quick response, which was to label any talk about a trade “premature.”

That, it most certainly is. Griffey, 38, needs just three more home runs to become the sixth man in major league history to hit 600. Cincinnati has promise and talent, but they’re also 14-21, already 8.5 games out in the National League Central. This is going to be a dreary year for the Reds, and you can comfortably bet your life savings that they won’t be trading the hometown legend until they’ve raked in all the cash there is to be had from fans flocking to the Great American Ball Park to witness a bit of baseball history. (Team management, you can also bet, is hoping even more than Mets fans are that Griffey doesn’t hit any home runs this weekend at Shea Stadium.)

Even when the time comes, though, it’s pretty hard to imagine that the Reds are going to put Griffey in position to win a championship. It would be nice to think that, simply by virtue of having been a great player and having represented the sport well for two decades, Griffey has earned the chance to play for a contender in his last years in the majors, but baseball doesn’t work that way. This isn’t about the Reds; it’s about other teams. Very few teams get near a World Series by squandering resources for sentimental reasons, and that’s what any contender that picked up Griffey would be doing.

To be clear, Griffey probably isn’t done as a player. He doesn’t really belong in the field at this point in his career, he may be hitting .244 AVG/.317 OBA/.378 SLG, and he may have missed an average of 57 games to injury over the last eight years, but he’s basically always hit when healthy. A team that counts on him as a centerpiece player will end up with a record like Cincinnati’s, but as a reserve in a role something like what Darryl Strawberry had with the Yankees a decade ago, he would actually be pretty valuable.

The problem, as it often is in baseball, is money. In 2000, Griffey signed an absurdly complicated contract to play for his hometown Reds. It will pay him $12.5 million this year, of which $6.5 million is deferred through 2024 at 4% interest, according to anonymous Reds sources cited at the usually reliable mlbcontracts.blogspot.com Web site. It also comes with a $16.5 million option for next year, which can be bought out for $4 million.

Obviously, no team is going to take on anything near this amount of money under any circumstances in exchange for a role-player who’s as likely as not to pull something and miss two months, and they certainly aren’t going to give Cincinnati young players of any value in exchange for the rights to do so. This means that to get even token prospects in return, the Reds would have to pay Griffey’s freight. But with Reds owner Bob Castellini having fired general manager Wayne Krivsky last month in part because of botched contracts that have left him paying millions to veterans such as Mike Stanton and Rheal Cormier, who are no longer playing for the team, it’s difficult to imagine the team paying millions so their supposed franchise player can play for someone else.

The shame of this is that Griffey’s playing days are drawing pretty close to their end, and this year will be one of the very few chances he has to play for a winner; he deserves better. Over the last nine years, his career has come to be defined, somewhat as Mickey Mantle’s was, by what he could have done. But what he has done is more than impressive enough. By the end of this year, for instance, he’ll almost certainly have moved into the all-time top five for plate appearances among career center fielders, and he’ll likely end his career behind only Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, and Tris Speaker — not bad for someone who hasn’t really been healthy since his 20s. And with just another couple of years of part-time play, he can move into the all-time top 10 in total bases, runs driven in, and extra-base hits, which is of course all the more impressive given that he’s one of the few stars of his era whose claims to be drug-free are actually quite plausible.

When Griffey did have the chance to strong-arm a team nearly a decade ago, as his contract was nearing its end in Seattle and he was at the height of his earning power, he used it to force a deal to a small-market team, where he signed a contract paying him something like 60% of his market value. It didn’t work out as it might have, but if there is any justice, the Reds will happily ship him off to Boston or Arizona or Chicago, that team would happily find a place for him on their bench, and he would hit a walk-off home run in Game 7 of the World Series. It just might happen yet; stranger things have. I wouldn’t, though, get too excited about the possibility.

tmarchman@nysun.com