Bad game against a bad team in which we squeaked out a good result by the skin of our teeth.
First, the good news: the offense rapped out 11 hits, including homers from Matt Olson (448 feet!!!!) and Ozzie Albies (his OPS zoomed all the way up to .609!) and two doubles by Sam Hilliard. Michael Tonkin, whose story you really ought to read if you haven’t already – he pitched for 11 teams over the last seven years in between major league stints – threw three scoreless innings and was indisputably the MVP of the game. Early in the season, he’s been the linchpin of our bullpen (and arguably our entire staff).
And the bad news: Kyle Wright‘s return from injury was, well, familiar to viewers of pre-2022 Kyle Wright. Three innings, four hits, four walks, four earned. It took him 75 pitches to record 12 outs. And these Reds are not a good ballclub. Joe Jimenez let things get entirely too interesting by giving up a late-inning homer to Jose Barrero, the powerful rookie shortstop who nevertheless is their 9-hole hitter due to the holes in his swing.
On the other other hand, this game featured 13 runs scored, 19 total hits, and 11 total pitchers – neither club had their starter make it out of the fourth inning. And the time of game was two hours and 44 minutes!! The improvement to the pace of the game has been impossible to overstate. This is one of the most momentous rules changes of my lifetime, and perhaps the single best.
Overall, this team is gimpy and not playing extremely well, and the starting pitching is a mess, but the offense is stacked enough to be able to power through problems against a bad team. Against good teams, though, the doctor’s bills are getting awfully difficult to ignore: Fried and Harris are two of the most important players on the team; d’Arnaud is one of the team’s better hitters and certainly its best DH; Iglesias is the team’s best reliever, and McHugh is one of the better ones. (Ian Anderson, sadly, is less of a loss to the team as currently constituted. And, obviously, same goes for guys like Kolby Allard and Huascar Ynoa.)
Those guys will be back, but it’s already clear that our team’s depth is shaky. We could use another DH-type on the bench – someone who National League teams used to call a “pinch hitter.” We also need a bunch more pitching, and I’m sure Alex Anthopoulos is working the phones incessantly. Our 8-4 record is better than our team is playing right now. And while injuries happen, I don’t think it’s necessarily true that our team can expect to have fewer injuries going forward than we have at present. When Harris returns we can hope to have all of our full-time starting offensive players in the lineup at the same time. Over the past few years, that rarely been the case, with all of the injuries sustained by Albies and Acuña.
If Wright is able to shake off the rust; if Morton is able to find a bit more feel, and pitch a sixth inning more regularly; if at least two of Bryce Elder, Dylan Dodd, Jared Shuster, and Michael Soroka are able to deliver five innings on a weekly basis; then there will be joy in Mudville. But that’s a whole lot of ifs. We can slug our way out of a wet paper bag, but if the Hammers can’t put up a few more zeroes against teams like the Reds, it’s gonna be a sticky summer.
(Okay, I’ll stop being Eeyore for a second. DOB indicates Fried could be ready to return as soon as this weekend, his first date of eligibility, and McHugh expects to be activated the first day he’s eligible, on April 21.)
Thanks Alex. Let’s see where we are when April is over.
OK Cassandra, compared to what? Is there any team whose fortunes are not balanced on the precipice, awaiting the next hamstring or UCL injury to take them from joy to despair? Is there any team who couldn’t use Manny Mota on the bench to produce a timely hit? (Yes… I woke up this morning in the late ’70s.) I agree that an NLCS next week against the Padres would leave us underequipped, but the last time I looked the NLCS was in October. Vita brevis, baseball CLXII. I’d rather be us right now than any other team, even though that unfortunately guarantees us nothing. Whom would you rather be?
As I’ve said all offseason, I think our club is about as good as any in baseball, top to bottom. And every club is going to sustain injuries – some (like the Dodgers with Lux and Buehler out) already far more grievous than ours. So to me that says that we can count on a certain amount of gimpiness going forward. We’ll have some games where we destroy good teams, as we did to the Cards, and others where we struggle against bad teams. All in all, we’re a good team with great hitting and iffy pitching. The latter will surely preoccupy the suits for the forseeable future.
Case in point. The Mutts.
Great recap, thanks AAR, also for sharing the Tonkin story.
Dare I say aloud that Ozuna’s PAs last night were all pretty good ones? Ever since the NL adopted the DH, the Braves have seemed to me to be in a passive-aggressive defiance to it. As if putting a good hitter into that role is like near the bottom of our priority list, and that position’s full season of at bats somehow don’t matter.
Ozuna is the perfect stereotypical DH – if he could hit. Maybe there’s hope.
Actually, I think a better comp for Ozzie offensively right now would be Rafael Furcal, who frequently got way too homer-happy, sold out for power, and disappeared at the plate for weeks at a time. Same height, too. Ozzie has way more natural power than Furcal did. But the sin is the same.