You can't predict ball

I love this game, despite how frustrating the hometown nine can be

Tonight was a good night. I mean, I know the Reds lost yesterday and they gave up a run early in tonight’s game against Miami. The Reds are below .500 and I have real questions about Nick Martinez as a starter. The club looks average at best at the moment.

But the weather was great, and I was able to sit outside in my back yard. The radio was tuned to 700 WLW. Birds were chirping. I decided against building a fire in the fire pit, but I had a good novel in my hands (Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami) that I struggled to pay attention to because I was listening to Tommy Thrall talk about baseball.

I’ve had worse evenings.

One of the by-products of Cincinnati’s organizational futility over the last three decades is that I no longer watch the games with an eye on the standings. I kind of just expect that the Reds are going to be also-rans. But I still love the game, and after being raised with Marty and Joe as the background soundtrack of my childhood, baseball still occupies mental space in the spring and summer.

So I still enjoy a quiet weeknight evening at home with the game on the radio. And whether the Reds are competitive this summer or not, I’m looking forward to many more nights like this.

The Reds are underrated…in a couple of specific ways, anyway

I spent last weekend in Dallas, visiting one of my brothers and his beautiful new daughter. (Bonus: another brother and his beautiful new daughter was visiting at the same time! I’m a lucky uncle.) On Friday night, we had a chance to go to a game at Globe Life Field, the home of the Texas Rangers.

The park was fine, I guess. It wasn’t as pretty as The Ballpark at Arlington, Texas’s former park, now called Choctaw Stadium, still standing and located just next door. But it was fine. The roof was closed, so it was like attending a game in an airport hangar. Doesn’t inspire the gooey-Field of Dreams sentiment that baseball usually inspires in me. But it was fine.

Globe Life Field (Photo: Chad Dotson)

The experience confirmed something I’ve said for quite some time: Great American Ball Park is completely underrated. I honestly don’t know why more people don’t consider GABP a great park. It’s one of my favorites, even accounting for home town bias.

The experience also confirmed something else I’ve said for a while, and even wrote about here in these digital pages a couple of years ago. Reds fans don’t realize how lucky we are to have the Reds Hall of Fame and Museum. Other teams don’t have anything to match it. Sure, I’d rather have a good team on the field, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate what we have. Compare the Reds HOF to the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame:

Texas Rangers Hall of Fame (photo: Chad Dotson)

Lame.

The Reds prove you can’t predict baseball

Perhaps my favorite thing about baseball is its inherent unpredictability. Even in this day and age when computer nerds control every aspect of the game—from transactions and contracts to lineups and defensive positioning—baseball has a way of making every “expert” look silly occasionally. As baseball writer Matthew Trueblood put it, “We have lots of tools for guessing how baseball might go, but baseball has even more ways of subverting our perfectly well-founded guesses.”

Three recent examples from the world of the Cincinnati Redlegs illustrate this point quite well. First up, let’s look at the Reds offense. As recently as last Friday, Cincinnati’s offensive output was among the very worst in either league. Going into the weekend series in Baltimore, the club’s hitting ranked 25th in the majors in OPS and no one with a bat in his hand had really distinguished himself.

And then the Reds went into Camden Yards and scored 38 runs in three games, winning two of three in the process. Now Cincinnati has 10 hitters with above-average offensive stats, and the club currently ranks ninth in the league in OPS. A perfect case study is our resident PED king Noelvi Marte. Before Sunday’s game, Marte was hitting .083/.154/.083. One game later he was at .316/.350/.579. Team-wide, an offense that had been struggling to dent the plate has now scored more runs than they’ve allowed, and the team was back to .500 (until last night). You can’t predict ball. Read the rest of this week’s column over at Cincinnati Magazine.