The Cincinnati Reds lost again to the Washington Nationals on Tuesday, the hosting club having dropped 10 of 12 games overall to fall 20 games under .500 prior to the start of the series. Since they lost on Monday, too, the Reds officially dropped the series and now must win in the getaway-day matinee on Wednesday to salvage a winning road trip that once looked so, so promising.
It’s emblematic of this club, really, who has both not yet been swept all season yet never managed to eek more than 5 games
above the .500 mark - something they did a blink ago before immediately dropping 3 straight.
Momentum, the single toughest thing to find in the game of baseball this side of Joey Votto, has continued to elude this Reds club. On Tuesday, it eluded them in one of the most frustrating ways possible.
Chase Burns, their electric rookie, had been absolutely befuddling Nats hitters for most of the night, entering the Bottom of the 6th on roughly 80 pitches and having yielded a trio of runs. He’d been lights-out with his slider - he struck out 10 against just 2 walks after eventually exiting. For a rookie whose overall innings cap has been much discussed, the idea of leaving him out there for the 6th at all was up for discussion, let alone after he allowed a pair of walks around a double to load the bases.
Burns didn’t get out of the inning. He yielded a 2-out single that scored a pair after an errant throw home from Jake Fraley bounced off catcher Tyler Stephenson, and the end result was the rook heading to the showers with 6 runs allowed (5 earned) on a night when he was much, much better than than. That’s now twice in his handful of starts where something similar has occurred, the end result being a frustrating end to something that, for a long time, had been so brilliant.
That’s the storyline of the Reds right now, who sit just 2 games over .500, are once again back in 4th place in their own division, and are now 3.5 games back of the final NL Wild Card spot (behind each of the Padres, Giants, and Cardinals). They’ve been so brilliant - at times - and keep ending up frustratingly right back where they began.
There’s a part of me that thinks this was Terry Francona giving Burns a chance to learn, to learn to fail, and to learn to eventually get back up after failing. That’s the kind of long-game move that very much will matter to the future star’s development. It’s just hard to be forced to once again endure that kind of marginal difference when this team - all ‘2 games over .500’ of them - is as close to being an actually ‘good’ team as we get once a decade around these parts.
It’s simply hard to stomach these kinds of losses when we’ve waded through so goddamn many that didn’t matter for so long.
This loss shouldn’t alter the Reds direction in the week leading up to the trade deadline. They’re still good, they still have Hunter Greene (and maybe Rhett Lowder and Wade Miley) on the mend, and they still owe it to us all to actually give a damn and try to get better in the next week. They’re close enough to justify it, and they owe us a freaking fortune in goodwill.
It would just be a whole lot easier to demand it if they’d finally find a way to string some positive momentum together, for once.
More from redreporter.com:
- The Reds have a problem on their hands
- Reds Tournament of the 2000s: Round 2
- An early look at the Reds 2017 schedule
- Brewers scored plenty, Reds didn't. Reds lost, 7-0.
- Joey Votto homered to back a great Dan Straily start, Reds beat Brewers, 6-4
- The 2017 MLB Draft: Six pitchers to know
- 18 Games at a time - Capsule 8
