The Most Frightening What-If of All

Maybe the Reds are what their record says they are

It’s FreeForAll Wednesday, live from the Wrong Side of the Bed. It happens. To get the Sunnier Me, cough up $8/month for five days a week of sheer love and happiness. Guaranteed.

Newest Red, Jacob Hurtubise.

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It wasn’t just that the Reds won a ballgame last night. That was a wonder in and of itself. It’s that they won it while starting players named Ford, Capel and Hurtubise. Mike, Conner and Jacob.

If we’re being honest, we’d say we hadn’t heard of our new friend Mike until he arrived seven days ago, and that we’d never heard of Conner and Jacob at all. No knock on these gentlemen, and congrats for making it to the Bigs. But when we’re doing all this analyzing of the Reds lagging start, we might save ourselves a whole lot of hand-wringing just by recalling who’s not playing, and who is.

An underrated problem with having so many players miss so much time is that it, well, hamstrings your ability to evaluate the talent on hand. Who are the Reds, really?

Tyler Stephenson allowed in AZ last night, “We all know how good we are and what we’re capable of.’’

Fair enough. Please fill the rest of us in.

Are you capable of winning more than 83 times? Explain.

There’s no assuming in baseball. You can’t say Matt McLain is going to return in August and be the Reds best player, as he was last year. Noelvi Marte had 113 big-league at-bats late last summer. How does that make him anything other than a hope and a wish?

If the first 4th of the ‘24 season has shown us anything, it’s that relying on the small sample size of a ‘23 season when most everything Went Right is no way to win your Over bet for total wins the following year.

Maybe the talent isn’t all that.

Brandon Larson

Maybe it was overrated. The Reds organization has a history of judging its young players in capital letters, from Bill Bergesch’s “crown jewels’’ to the hype lavished upon Pokey Reese, Brandon Larson, Homer Bailey. Robert Stephenson. The one and only Kal Daniels etc. etc.

(Name the Crown Jewels, win a Murray Cook bobblehead.)

Is that the case now? Overrating the potential, I mean.

It could be.

More frightening than the current slow start is the prospect it might not be all that slow. Then what?

Other than Elly De La Clemente, we haven’t seen any breakouts this season. The Reds have a bunch of “useful’’ players. Who’s a star? Who shows starry potential?

We all know how good we are and what we’re capable of.

The Everyday Eight is full of solid pros. Fraley, Friedl, Steer, Stephenson, India, Candelario. Benson, when he makes contact. If the All Star team were announced today, who’d be on it?

The optimists among us believe good times are as close as the returns of McLain and Marte. Time will tell. But we’re not fortune-tellers here. We’re not in the Ouija board business. We see better than we hear.

Objectively, what we’re seeing now is not a young team, blooming.

Now, then. . .

MORE NEGATIVITY. MAYBE IT’S THE WEATHER. In addressing the 4-year, $212 mil contract extension the Lions just gave QB Jared Goff, Yahoo’s Frank Schwab offers this:

From the start of the salary cap era in 1994 until Patrick Mahomes' second title in 2022, every Super Bowl-winning QB made 13.1% or less of the salary cap. It's easy to figure out: When one player is taking up that much of the cap, it's hard to build a championship team around him.

‌We don't yet know all the specifics of Goff's extension, but a deal worth $53 million per year is going to be well over 13.1% no matter how it is structured, when it kicks in after the 2024 season.

History suggests your QB can't make more than 13% of the cap if you want to win a Super Bowl. Mahomes is the lone exception, with cap hits of 17.2% and 15.6% the past two seasons.

The ‘24 cap is $254.4 mil. Joe Burrow will make $55 mil. That’s 22 percent of the cap space.

NAVEL-GAZING BECAUSE IT’S MY BLOG. Youse have recurrent dreams? Me, too.

Sometimes it’s the Falling Dream, when I’m dropping like a boulder through open air. Others, I’m in high school, late for class, and I’m lost down an empty hallway. Interpreters would have a field day with my psyche. A lack of self-confidence, perhaps, a void of take-charge optimism.

Mr. Daugherty, it seems you let life happen to you. You should be happening to life.

Last night was a good one, and also is a regular in the dream rotation. I’m in the glassware/china section of a department store and I have a baseball bat. Honestly, who wouldn’t want that scenario? You’re in a less-than-sunny way, you need to rid yourself of some tension and — BLAMM-O — you’re taking out the Waterford and the Lenox with optimum bat speed and launch angle.

Youse feel me on this?

Your strangest recurrent dreams, please.

DUH. . . Tom Brady says he wouldn’t be roasted again. The jokes affected his children, all three of them, ages 11 to 16.

“It’s the hardest part about … like the bittersweet aspect of when you do something that you think is one way and then all of a sudden you realize 'I wouldn’t do that again' because of the way that it affected actually the people that I care about the most in the world.

“You don’t see the full picture all the time," Brady added. “Sometimes you’re naive. You don’t know."

Sorry. No sale. Brady has lived the capital-letters life for going on two decades. He didn’t know the drill when it came to being roasted? In a large room filled with jocks and jocker-room behavior? Please.

When men were men. . .

MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE MENTAL HEALTH days and manicures and turn-down service in the trainer’s room.

This is not an OG world, I realize that. Certainly not when you’re a sports fan. OG fans recall Hacksaw Reynolds playing football with a broken leg and Joe Theismann playing QB with a one-bar facemask and pitchers throwing fastballs with sore elbows and actually completing games. Cal Ripken isn’t walking through that door. I get it. I don’t prefer it.

And I do not necessarily understand this, via ESPN.com:

Baseball might not be the first sport that comes to mind when you hear the term "load management," but MLB teams are becoming obsessed with it.

(Baseball) front offices and coaching staffs have learned to collaborate with players, finding ways to lighten their load behind the scenes while still allowing them to appear in games. The manager is often the middleman between the medical team, strength coaches and players.

Teams monitor everything players do, starting with the obvious -- how much distance has he covered on a given night, both on the basepaths and defensively in the field. Tracking also takes into account the small details that go into the equation -- how many times did a player take off from first base on a full count? How frequently did he dive for a ball in the infield? Each bit of information helps teams get ahead of potential health problems or dips in production.

The San Diego Padres, for example, track workloads for their players in running 30-day increments, using sheets color-coded for high-effort runs, top sprint speed and taxing defensive movements.

Oh, do they now.

Question: Does a MLB manager do anything that isn’t dictated by stats? I thought part of being a good manager was the ability to manage people. Play hunches, get a down-deep feel for each player’s abilities, which would include his mental makeup.

That’s so last decade.

Now, they use “sheets color-coded for high-effort runs.’’

Which, to some of us, is micro-managed neurosis.

Rough night, Doc?

Yes.

And finally. . . Max Homa offered a candid assessment of golf’s ongoing civil war, three days before the PGA Championship starts in Louisville:

It's very troubling. I don't like where it's going. It's got to be exhausting to be a casual golf fan. I don't know why you would want to hear about the business side of this game. As a fan of other sports, I do not care about the business side of what the Lakers and Dodgers are doing. I hope at some point soon we can just get back to entertaining people and playing golf and not talking about what our Player Advisory Council is going to do. The fans of golf should not know who is on the board.

Wish I’d written that. No, wait a minute. I have written that.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . A perfect expression of tightly wound rage. I remember hearing Nirvana play this tune on one of the late-night talk shows and thinking, “this is what’s trending in rock now? This sucks.’’

I was wr. . . wr. . . wr. . . not completely right about that.

Great, great tune. Anthemic. Garage music at its finest, and I love garage music. Here we are now. . .