Hit or Miss. Mostly Miss

Reds offense needs some juju from Jobu

*

FreeForAll Monday opens with a prayer to Jobu for the hit-lorn Cincinnati Reds, before we amble off to the waterway to wonder about existential stuff, such as the life of a 2nd-place racehorse. Today’s gratis. Five days a week’ll cost you $8/month, about the same as a decent cigar. And it won’t kill you. Enjoy.

Watching the Reds hit now is an exercise in masochism. Ever been to the state fair and tried to win your girlfriend a stuffed animal, by throwing plastic rings at milk bottles? It’s like that.

The numbers are a wreck on the highway.

The Reds need to start praying to Jobu, to heal their sick bats. If it was good enough for Pedro Cerrano, it’s good enough for The Club.

In the micro sense:

Two runs in three games over the weekend, 11 hits total, at the Small Park. Eight runs in the current five-game L streak. In the last seven days (six games), the Reds are 29th of 30 teams in runs and OPS. They didn’t hit the ball especially hard or hit into bad luck. They didn’t hit at all.

In the macro-sense, the Reds spend lots of time at K-Mart: Fourth in MLB in strikeouts, last in batting average, 28th in on-base percentage. We could go on, but why watch The Exorcist over and over if you don’t like horror shows?

This, too, shall pass.

Maybe. Probably. I mean sooner or later, yeah? Yeah?

Problem is, there is no track record. There is no prime-time Joey Votto, who you know will hit above .300, even if he’s hitting .200 today. No Jay Bruce to hit 25 homers like ringing a bell. No Brandon Phillips, a .279 hitter across his 11 Reds seasons.

No-track-record is a Reds issue across the board. It’s a reason in March that experts seemingly low-balled the Club’s expected win total. Young teams are great, and then they’re not. We assumed CES would continue raking, Steer would do likewise and De La Cruz would take off. Only one of those assumptions has proved true.

At the moment, the young Reds are battling opposing pitchers and themselves with equal futility.

Part of escaping a batting slump is having the confidence it’s temporary. That reassurance comes only with experience. How many big-league slumps has CES experienced?

Steer? Benson? Matt McLain will return in August. Who will he be?

What the first month-plus of this season has taught us is, we have no idea.

The Orioles dominated them with Cole Irvin, John Means and Dean Kremer. Not quite Palmer, Cuellar and McNally. Not even Corbin Burnes or Kyle Bradish. Yes, Baltimore came in playing well and the heretofore eh Irvin has now thrown 27 consecutive scoreless innings.

Slumps are mystical things. Most of the time, hitters don’t know why they slump, or why they break slumps. It’s not unlike writing. Seriously. One day the words flow like honey off a spoon. The next day, you wake up and start typing “had went.’’

You say to yourself, “I’ve been doing this most of my life and today I write “had went’’?

Hitters spend decades honing their craft. They know how to hit. Until they spend too many nights going 0-for-4 and staring at the hotel room ceiling at 4 in the morning.

“We’ve just got to keep working, continue with our process, continue to make adjustments and work through it – continue to swing it and continue to look for our pitches to hit,” Reds manager David Bell said Friday night. “All the things that we do, we have to stay with it.”

It sounds simplistic. Maybe to you it sounds like typical, DBell shrug-speak. It’s also completely correct. Bad things happen to young ballplayers who live in their heads. Trying harder is not the answer. Trusting your talent and the process are the answers.

The Reds will snap out of it. Maybe tomorrow v. AZ ace Zac Gallen. This is the hope. It is not assumed.

Now, then. . .

(WCKY.org)

HERE’S WHAT I THINK ABOUT while sitting on the bench at the end of the pier on the Intercoastal Waterway at Robinson Preserve in Bradenton:

1. Sierra Leone and the act of finishing 2nd at the Kentucky Derby.

Vanquished by a nose.

By less than half the length of Mystik Dan’s head.

You pour hours and days and weeks and months and years into getting a horse to the gate at Churchill Downs. The love, the work, the passion. All for a dream that falls short by a couple inches.

Dan Fogelberg called it “the chance of a lifetime, in a lifetime of chance.’’ What’s that feel like?

I feel no special sympathy for the owners, who were rich enough to spend $2.3 million for Sierra Leone two years back. They’ll survive. Chad Brown was already a very well-known trainer before he worked with this horse: He has trained 10 Eclipse Award winners and a Triple Crown champ. He’ll do just fine.

So will the jockey, Tyler Gaffalione, who has more than 1,000 career wins, including a Preakness.

The bettors will always lose money. The sympathy I feel is for the situation. You get no do-overs in the Triple Crown. The horse won’t be two again next year. This was it.

The owners will make millions off Sierra Leone, the trainer and jockey emerge with reps intact, maybe enhanced. The horse will run again before living the perfect life at stud.

The moment, though. The moment’s not coming back.

2. Fred Stewart and the art of friendship.

Fred was my best friend in life. He had a drinking problem. It killed him. From 6th grade until his passing a few years ago, we were close, if only in spirit. As kids and then well into our teens, we had everything in common. Sports, girls, cars, doing things we weren’t supposed to do.

As adults, we had nothing in common. Nothing at all. Yet we maintained our friendship, maybe just because we knew it still mattered. I don’t regret not staying in closer touch with Fred. Regret is an easy, cheap emotion. Life imposes and nothing stays the same. There’s not always much we can do about that.

I do marvel at lifelong friendships, though, that survive the inevitable cracks in the foundation. The energy required, the impossibility of it all.

Do you have a friend you’ve known for, say, 30 years or more? How? How important is it to you?

3. My mother was a bird lover. She filled the house with bird art, she filled the feeders with seed. She got so many bird-related gifts, she finally told us to stop giving them to her. When I go to Robinson Preserve now, I don’t suspect that when I spot a heron in the mangroves, it’s my late mother saying hello. I’m convinced of it.

Sometimes, I see a heron or an egret at Robinson. Just as often, I don’t. It’s the random nature of the sightings that gives them their hold on my imagination.

The other day, I was sitting on that bench, thinking about Sierra Leone, when a bird I’d never seen before, and didn’t recognize, landed 20 feet down the pier. . . and slowly hopped/walked toward me. A heron never did that.

The bird got to within 10 feet of me. He met my gaze for several seconds, then turned around and hopped back into the mangrove.

I’ll believe what I believe.

TRIP REPORT, FOR NOW. . . May is usually a very good month for getting around Bradenton-Longboat Key-Anna Maria without a mini-LA traffic jam finding you. Not anymore. At least not this week. On weekends, I suggest not trying to go to the beach. At sunset, I suggest sitting in the dark for half an hour, enjoying the stars and avoiding the conga-line of cars on Gulf Drive headed inland.

Pave paradise, Joni Mitchell sang, put up a parking lot.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Haven’t used this one in a good while. It moves.