There was a poignant moment for the Cincinnati Reds during their 8-4 loss to the Chicago Cubs in Great American Ball Park on Sunday afternoon. The Reds, last place residents of the NL Central and now 9 games under .500, actually looked like they might have figured things out for once.
Andrew Abbott had labored through a 30 pitch Top of the 1st and the Reds had fallen behind immediately 2-0. However, they finally found a way to battle back against Cubs lefty Matthew Boyd, the culmination of which was
a 433 foot blast into the upper deck in LF by Eugenio Suarez to give them a 4-2 lead.
They’d flipped the scoreboard. Geno’s homer was his 200th as a member of the Reds, which was awesome. VIbes heading into the All Star break suddenly felt like they were on the right track again.
Then came an otherwise routine grounder up the middle in the bottom half of the frame. The Cubs had loaded the bags against Abbott with 2-out, and Kevin Alcantara poked a comebacker right past the Cincinnati southpaw towards the bag at 2B, where Edwin Arroyo was perfectly positioned to field it, step on the bag, and end the threat. The ball, however, had other plans, and doinked off the bag and over into RF for a shit-luck single that scored a pair of runners to tie the game.
Just as soon as the vibes around the team felt good, for once, they immediately turned sour again.
By the time the Top of the 7th rolled around, things just felt inevitable. With Sam Moll on the mound, another slow grounder to almost the exact same spot went to Arroyo, who fielded it and momentarily hesitated between trying to tag the runner or throw to 1B – and by the time he threw, it was too late. That chased Moll, Pierce Johnson was summoned, and Pierce immediately served up the back-breaking 3-run bomb to Alex Bregman.
That poignant moment? Initially I thought it was Geno’s homer, a feel-good blast that, at 111.3 mph off the bat, was his hardest-hit ball of the year and gave him homers in back to back games. He’s getting hot, I said out loud. He’s going to help carry the Reds for a bit!
Of course, that was only to realize there’s no game tomorrow. There’s not a game for days. The Reds lost anyway despite Geno’s big swat, and the actual poignant moment was that we’re almost certainly heading into the final three weeks of his Cincinnati career.
The Reds have just 16 games between now and the August 3rd trade deadline, and Geno getting hot would be a blessing for Nick Krall, assuming he’s still in charge of the team by then. However, the first 9 games out of the break are all on the road (including out here in Colorado where I plan to go see them), and by the time the Reds return home on July 27th Geno could well already be in a different uniform. That’s just how all of this works when the losses stack up way faster than the wins.
So, the 200th dinger of his Reds career could very well be his final swat in GABP in a Reds uniform. Hell, today might well have been the last time we ever get to see him in GABP in a Reds uniform altogether.
Someone’s going to trade for him. The Reds might have to eat a little cash, but his ability to get fiery-hot in streaks and track record mean that the back of his baseball card this year – which was interrupted for the first time in his career by an oblique issue that he’s had to fight back from – aren’t going to simply make teams avoid him altogether. That swing today, that 111 mph missile, is exactly what the circling sharks want to see from him, and they’ll pay more attention to that one day after he went the other way for a different homer than they will to his overall struggles since Opening Day.
We got to see Geno hit a high note again on Sunday in an another otherwise lost season in Cincinnati, a throwback to when he used to do that in these kinds of seasons all the time when we were younger. At least we all managed to get that once more.
