With the Reds fading into irrelevance even earlier than usual this season, I keep asking myself why I bother with this organization. Clearly ownership and the front office have minimal interest in putting a serious contender on the field, so why waste my time?
There are a few reasons I’ve identified. One was eloquently described by Roger Angell, my favorite sportswriter of all time. Recently I’ve been reading three of his collections of essays originally published in The New Yorker, and his perfectly crafted words keep reminding me why I love this dumb sport and this dumb team. For example, half a century ago, Angell wrote this:
It is the national pastime. It is youth, springtime, a trip to the country, part of our past. It is the roaring excitement of huge urban crowds and the sleepy green afternoon silences of midsummer. Without effort, it engenders and thrives on heroes, legends, self-identification, and home-town pride. For six months of the year, it intrudes cheerfully into every American home, then frequently rises to a point of nearly insupportable tension and absorption, and concludes in the happy explosion of the country’s favorite sporting spectacle, the World Series.
So yeah, as most of you already know, I have a similarly sentimental view of the ol’ ballgame. But there are other reasons. I’ve already explained to you, dear reader, that I’m hopeless; I can’t quit this team even if I wanted to. I just love baseball, the most perfect sport on the planet, and the Reds are the only game in town. To paraphrase the eloquent words of the Reds’ current CEO and PR genius, Phil Castellini: Where am I gonna go? (Another reason: It’s easier to write this column every week if I’m actually, you know, paying attention to the Cincinnati Reds.)
And then there’s the brilliance of Cincinnati’s newest kid sensation, Rhett Lowder. Angell also wrote this:
Part of me, much of the fan in me, is attracted to baseball games exactly because they connect me on a long straight line to my own boyhood, and because they so often seem to be the perfect release from the daily world of money, strikes, strife, and complexity.
I’m old enough to remember marveling over Mario Soto and being flabbergasted by the fact that Tom Browning won 20 games in his rookie season. Now, all these years later, it’s Lowder making me swoon. Very little about baseball in Cincinnati has gotten fans jazzed this season, but the recent debut of last year’s first round draft pick has been among the campaign’s highlights.
Lowder began the season in High-A Dayton, where he excelled with a 2.49 ERA in five starts. He was promoted to Double-A Chattanooga in May, where he struggled initially but improved dramatically by mid-July, posting a 1.06 ERA over six starts. After a strong Triple-A debut in Louisville a couple of weeks ago, the Reds, facing multiple injuries in their pitching rotation, gave Lowder his chance in the major leagues. He’s now made two big league starts, both against first-place teams, and has been pretty great. Last Thursday, he pitched into the seventh inning, limiting Houston to only four hits, all singles, and dropping his career ERA to 0.87. That’s a pretty good number, the baseball experts tell me. A great story, right?
But if the last 12 months have taught me anything, it’s that we should never get too excited about the ability of hot young prospects to deliver a winning record in this team game. Cincinnati ownership and management have made it clear that they won’t go out of their way to surround Lowder, Elly De La Cruz, and Hunter Greene with sufficient talent to make the Reds a surefire pennant contender. Here again, Angell has described why that hardly matters to a hopeless baseball fan:
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
In New York over the weekend, the Reds went 18 innings without so much as a single run crossing home plate. It was difficult to watch. But on Sunday, one inning shy of getting swept by the Mets, Cincinnati infielder Santiago Espinal delivered a one-out double that scored two runs and delivered a 3-1 Reds win. It sent many of us into fits of excitement, because we care. We care deeply and passionately, really care about these Cincinnati Reds.
But it wasn’t exciting because it pushed the Reds forward in the pennant race. That’s not the type of thing that happens here. We have to find other reasons to love the game and this team that, more often than not, breaks our collective hearts. And the simple joy of a backup infielder delivering a game-winning hit or a dazzling young pitcher providing a glimpse of a potentially great future in yet another lost season can still bring screams of elation from a battered fan base.
As Angell also wrote, the fervent loyalties of baseball are almost, but not quite, indestructible.
The Castellinis have done everything in their power to destroy those fervent loyalties to the hometown nine. You know and I know that the Reds don’t care about us. But somehow, for some reason, we still care about them. And for many of us, I’m not sure that’s ever going to change.
We’re hopeless.
Chad Dotson helms Reds coverage at Cincinnati Magazine and hosts a long-running Reds podcast, The Riverfront. His newsletter about Cincinnati sports can be found at chaddotson.com. He’s @dotsonc on Twitter.
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