CNATI: Cincinnati OH Sports Journalism

Cincinnati Reds

More questions than answers

By C. Trent Rosecrans, CNATI.com Posted April 25, 2010 5:44 PM ET

A 5-4 victory over the Padres on Sunday was good for the Reds. Dusty Baker talked to the media, players were able to smile and exhale and the team leaves for Houston and St. Louis with a .500 record at home for the homestand and the season.

"I wanted to meet you guys today," Dusty Baker joked with the media the day after he refused to talk to the media because he was so upset at his team's play.

After 19 games, though, the Reds are 8-11, aren't hitting, aren't pitching well and aren't playing particularly good defense.

Of the Reds eight wins, seven have come in the last at-bat -- does that mean this team is lucky to have that many wins, or a scrappy bunch of fighters?

The Reds are hitting just .242 as a team -- and only one player is hitting at their career level (Scott Rolen is hitting .283, his career average) and only one more is within 20 points of his career batting average (Ramon Hernandez .262/.250). So are the batters underachieving or regressing?

Either way, the Reds are actually scoring some runs, their 87 runs scored are the eighth-best mark in the majors (5th in the NL).

Problem is, they're giving up the second-most runs in the game, having allowed 116 runs through 19 games, trailing on the Pirates, who have allowe 130, including 20 in one game earlier this week.

The team ERA is 6.02, better only than Pittsburgh in baseball. The starters have a 6.52 ERA and the relievers have a 5.43 -- both of these are made up largely of the same players that seventh in the National League in ERA in 2009 with a 4.18 ERA.

Over 162 games, things do tend to even out -- or at least regress to the mean. With 143 games left, what's the difference between a streak and a trend? With 19 games of data, there's enough tempting data to make a conclusion, but there's still no real answer, just hunches.

"What I haven't figured about this year right now, eight wins, seven in our our last at-bats, that's not normal. There's nothing normal going on here right now," said Rolen, the team's elder statesman. "We need to weather this storm -- sorry for the cliché -- just get back to some normalcy and win some ball games and lose some ball games and not just up and down and up and down, battling back and losing, we just haven't had a normal start to anything. Hopefully we can hang on and stay in there and generally speaking you don't have to fight this hard for everything we get."

Sunday was one of the hard-fought wins -- the Reds trailed early when Adrian Gonzalez hit a two-run home run off of Homer Bailey in the fourth, before the Reds tied it up in the bottom half of the inning with RBIs from Jay Bruce and Hernandez. Bailey gave up two more runs in the sixth, but Rolen homered in that inning and Hernandez came through with the go-ahead RBI in the eighth before Francisco Cordero closed out the game.

It was a win -- and when you have fewer wins than loses, ever win is good -- but it was typical of a pattern from the Reds team in the early season. But is it normal? Over 162 games, can a closer have saves on 88 percent of his team's wins, plus a win in the other?

Doubtful, but that's how the Reds are winning now.

"Sometimes it looks ugly, but sometimes maybe we put too much pressure on ourselves and make it worse," said Hernandez.

With 12 percent of the schedule in the books, are the first 19 games a harbinger of things to come? Since 1970, this is the sixth time the Reds have started 8-11. In those other five seasons, the team has finished with a winning record three times, and a losing record twice. Both of the Reds most recent winning seasons, 1999 and 2000, started with 8-11 starts, but so did 2008 when the team went 74-88 and fired general manager Wayne Krivsky after a 9-12 start. It's other two 8-11 starts in that time period were 1971 and 1972, the later ended with a loss to Oakland in the World Series.

None of that has a bearing in 2010.

That's why Baker had a closed-door blow-up with his team following Saturday's loss to the Padres. He was hoping to stem the tide before it got out of hand. He railed against his players, chastised them for stupid mistakes on the basepaths and in the field.

"We looked like Little Leaguers out there. We didn't play a good baseball game at all and we can't expect to win like that," Bruce said of Saturday's 10-0 loss. "I'm not calling anyone out, it's not any one person's fault, it's just that we as a team didn't play well. You can't win game when you don't execute things you're supposed to. I think sometimes we're not going out there to win, we're going out there not to lose."

With a fanbase and front office looking to stop the current streak of nine consecutive losing seasons, that get in their heads. But it doesn't help that the team hasn't played winning baseball.

For one day they did, and occasionally they have. But it's been as inconsistent as the numbers indicate and is it, as Baker likes to note, "the law of averages" or is this a team in serious trouble?

The manager, in the last year of his contract, is looking to see the bright side.

"The reality of where we are, one starter having a win and still look up on the board and see some low-.200s, we have some guys who can hit," Baker said. "I'm seeing Brandon with two home runs and Joey with three and that tells me there's a whole bunch due that's coming, that's I look at it."

The other way would be to read into the numbers, this is a team playing .421 baseball -- with five months of the season left.

"It's April, we're not panicking at all," said Bruce, who had three hits and an RBI on Sunday. "It's a wake-up call and reality check, but we need to get it going."

Categories: Cincinnati Reds, Featured Stories

Tags: Dusty Baker, Homer Bailey, Jay Bruce, Ramon Hernandez, Scott Rolen