The Cincinnati Reds did what they’ve done often of late in the darkness of Friday night – jumped out to an early, albeit meager lead in Sacramento against the A’s.
Will Benson’s 2-run dinger off the wall beyond the centerfield wall was brilliant and beautiful, though in hindsight it seemed to only set the yardage for how hard you’d need to hit a baseball to have it clear the batter’s eye altogether.
The A’s rallied off Cincinnati ace Hunter Greene, pushing the Reds once again to their bullpen earlier
than manager Terry Francona would have ever wanted. Nick Martinez, who the Reds gave a Qualifying Offer to this offseason which he accepted for some $21.05 million, then came on in a bulk relief role, limiting the A’s to just a lone run over 2.2 IP while the bats clawed their way back – Tyler Stephenson, in particular, came up large with a 3-run shot over the right field wall that put the Reds right back in the thick of the conversation.
When Francona turned to the arms who’ve done so much of the heavy lifting at the back end of the bullpen, though, things immediately went to crap.
They’re overworked. That’s been readily evident since long before this particular occassion. Still, as Graham Ashcraft saw all of his offereing pelted around the diamond for hits and Scott Barlow couldn’t find the strike zone to save his life, it became clear that the Reds were about to find their fortunes dashed once again by the rebuilding A’s in one of the biggest spots of their season.
Nick Kurtz, who is going to win the American League Rookie of the Year Award this year, was taken 4th overall in last summer’s MLB Draft out of Wake Forest, just two picks after the Cincinnati Reds selected pitcher Chase Burns out of Wake Forest, too. It represented something of a dichotomy of approaches between the two clubs – the Reds jumping to take another talented pitcher as they’ve done so often with their high picks during their rebuild, while the A’s took a mostly positionless bat who could sock the hell out of the ball.
Both methodologies have their valid points. Oakland’s, Sacramento’s, Vegas’s had the upper hand on Friday, however, as precisely one day after Burns pitched some medium-leverage relief innings after an arm scare every pitcher on the planet will face, Kurtz sent a ball 493 feet into the stratosphere to both win a game and seal a highlight memory to everyone who ever had the chance to witness it.
Kurtz’s homer – a grand slam, naturally – cleared the batter’s eye some 70 feet further than Benson’s homer earlier in the game and put the game completely on ice. It gave the A’s an insurmountable 11-5 lead and sunk the wherewithal of every Reds player in the stadium to a new low.
It also sunk the Reds right back to baseball purgatory – right at the .500 mark for the season.
Yeah, they’re still ‘close to a playoff spot’ and ‘not mathematically eliminated’ with barely two weeks of the season remaining. But they’re also a whiff away from having lost more games than they’ve won, an indicator far more important to their overall progress than potentially managing to sneak into the expanded postseason as the game’s 14th best team.
Last night burned, and burned bad. Their hopes were dashed in the most epic possible way – by a player they don’t have doing something nobody else on their own roster could do if they tried right now, a clear example of being bested completely by something they can’t even replicate at their best.
Maybe they’ll pick themselves up off the mat again, as they’ve done a couple times already this season when things looked bleak. This time, though, it just felt different.
