The Cincinnati Reds lost to the St. Louis Cardinals again on Sunday. Much like Saturday’s loss, the team scraped and clawed their way to the game still being tight late, only for the bullpen to fork over the game in the 8th inning.
The bullpen is a problem, yes. There are simply too few arms down there that can be turned to in any situation, let alone late and close, and their inability to find the plate is a problem with no clear fix.
Not to be outdone, their starting pitching still struggles mightily
on pretty much every day in which Chase Burns is not the starter, and we all know how quickly he is sprinting towards hitting his innings cap for the season. Reds starters owned a collective 5.07 FIP on the season entering Sunday’s start by Rhett Lowder, one in which he danced around 5 walks and just 4 strikeouts in his 70-pitch trio of innings. The only clubs with worse marks so far this year are the perpetually rebuilding A’s and Colorado Rockies.
Cincinnati is now riding a four-game losing streak after being swept by St. Louis, and have lost five of their last six. They’ve won just two of their last ten games, and it’s startling just how off their offense has looked in that time (which overlaps completely the days since Elly De La Cruz hit the shelf with his hamstring problem). In those last ten games, they’ve scored two, three, two, six, two, four, two, three, five, and three runs, it being simply impossible for any of their biggest bats to get hot at the same time in the absence of their star.
At 31-33 through 64 games, it also seems as if they’ve already played most of their cards. They’ve rifled through all of their AAA bullpen options in attempts to patch that battered unit, have watched it still not work, and lost a couple guys to free agency through being DFA’d in the process. They’ve called up Rece Hinds, JJ Bleday, Noelvi Marte, and Edwin Arroyo to give them their shots, and only Bleday – who’s cooled over the last week – has hit the ground running. There is no obvious bat to call up to fix those woes.
Chase Petty got a cup of coffee and showed improvement, but not nearly enough to, say, cut Brady Singer and let Petty do heavy lifting for the rest of the year. If anything, keeping Singer – one of the four worst pitchers in the sport who’ve thrown at least 50 IP this year – to mop things up and keep innings off other, more controllable arms has to be in the discussion. Even the idea of rushing Hunter Greene back to ride to the rotation’s rescue at the moment seems like Pickett’s Charge in its feasibility.
The Cincinnati Reds are in a terrible rut, and they need a spark in the worst of ways. It’s just getting increasingly hard to find where that will come from, or if it’s at all possible for it to happen in a way that can help salvage this once promising season.
The reality is that it’d be completely easy to simply write about how this team’s ownership and front office have failed to get the job done, but since there’s been so much continuity there through the mediocre, at best, last few decades, that’s the short way to cover this story. So, in the meantime, we get to be critical of the pieces put in play on the field and in the dugout since it seems foolish to believe there would ever be greater change higher up. And, once again, the product on the field simply looks lackluster when compared to most teams – in particular, this weekend, their once-heated rivals in St. Louis
