Reds pitchers and catchers are ready

How do you feel about that?

Goodyear Ballpark

Reds pitchers and catchers report tomorrow.

How do you feel about that?

It used to be the least ambivalent of sentences. Who wants dessert? It’s Friday afternoon! I just won the lottery. Pitchers and catchers report.

A magical sentence, possibility in every syllable.

How do you feel about that?

This isn’t a provocative question. I don’t need the page views/Open Rate, even as I love seeing them increase. The beauty of working for free is you don’t have to worry about page views. No, this is an existential question. It’s about who we’ve become as sports fans and as a nation.

It’s Terence Mann, talking to Ray Kinsella as the high corn sways and glows:

People will come, Ray.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.

America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.

This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.

Yeah?

Pitchers and catchers. . .

Pro sports depend on a few assumptions. Chief among them is the idea that we’ll always come back, because we always have. To now, that has been largely true. If you win them, we will come. The Reds have been boom-bust. Attendance has reflected success or lack thereof. This isn’t St. Louis.

It’s different now. I can’t point to numbers, beyond the obvious. But I’ve been here 35 seasons and I’m good at catching drifts. In the past, you didn’t go, but you still cared. Your anger was momentary. Now?

It seems more like a grudge. Or worse, a shrug.

There doesn’t seem to be a dormant demand for the Reds, waiting to be freed when the team starts winning again. It feels deeper than that. As if we’ve moved on.

Reasons? Phil and FC Cincinnati. A hope deficit. Baseball economics. Rob Manfred. I could give you 68 million reasons. That’s the Reds projected payroll this year. It was $130 mil just two years ago.

Collectively, the ponderous weight of all that ballast has you running for a different form of comfort that doesn’t have room for a seat in the Moon Deck.

Baseball has lost its middle class. Its face no longer looks like America. The country itself is hurting in the middle. Middle-class is what lots of us strived for growing up. It’s what the Reds and clubs like them are seeking now. It seems less possible than ever. What’s left for MLB’s striving class but being lousy for five years, with the hope of being good for two? Not everyone can be the Rays.

It’s just so damned hard. That describes teams like the Reds, who hunt nickels on the sidewalk and hope to save enough to buy a new pair of shoes, or at least a ballclub that will contend for a year or two.

Is that any different than the struggling middle-class, doing battle at the grocery store when eggs are $6 a dozen?

If baseball is in trouble in Cincinnati, baseball is in trouble. We are the canary in the coal mine.

Since 2013, the Reds have mostly free-fallen. Two winning seasons, four last-place finishes, 100 Ls last year. A collective 166 games under .500 in those nine inglorious seasons.

Cowboy

During that time, I’ve suggested some survival skills. They all start with taking the game on its terms. Loving baseball for baseball, independent of results. A fine July night doesn’t care how the Reds do. An evening on the deck isn’t tethered to the fortunes of the home team.

Listening to Brantley is possible even when The Club is miserable. In most cases, listening to Brantley is more entertaining than watching the game. Bally who? Bankruptcy what? I couldn’t care less. My radio still works.

If you love the game for the game, Ray, the game won’t let you down.

Do you love the game?

Pitchers and catchers tomorrow in Goodyear. How do you feel about that?

Now, then. . .

PLEASE. . . Thanks for answering, but no knee-jerk exclamation points. If you’re Done With the Reds! until The Owner Sells the Team! that’s fine and understandable. But that’s not what I’m looking for today, mainly because it’s more obvious than a Hunter Greene fastball.

Lemme know if your love of the game — more importantly, your love of the concept of the game — summer, deck, radio, cigar, beer — can sustain you during what’s going to be another losing season.

AT LEAST THIS IS PROMISING. . . Could we actually get back to sub-three hour games? MLB data suggests there’s a decent chance:

On average, minor league games with the pitch clock in place last year were 25 minutes shorter in 2022 than games without the clock during the 2021 season. (ESPN.com)

I like every change. More singles, more stolen bases, shorter games with better pace. Not sure how anyone could be against any of that.

It’ll take fine-tuning. For example: Because the pitch clock doesn’t start until a pitcher is on the mound, I can see pitchers going through the signs while standing on the grass. But the die has been cast. Finally.

JUST STOP. . . I’ve never been a Terry Bradshaw guy. Now, he’s taking heat for poking fun at Andy Reid’s size. USAToday:

Calling Reid "the big guy" wasn't the source of the outrage. Reid is a larger fellow. But his next comment – "come on, waddle over here" was unnecessary. Critics called it fat shaming.

Um, no.

Start with the fact that Bradshaw himself isn’t exactly lithe. Proceed to the fact that he and Reid have known each other for years, and that in the super-heated macho world of the NFL, jocking among players and coaches is routine.

This sort of finger-wagging judgment serves only to trivialize real matters of careless, hurtful speech. It’s not “shaming.’’ It’s shameful.

It’s useful, in my experience in handling questionable speech directed at my child, to employ Context and Intent. In what context did the speaker slur my daughter? What was the intent?

Most of what she has encountered over the years has qualified as ignorance, not malice. I point it out, the speaker can’t apologize enough, we shake hands and move on. We don’t go after one another like a couple of 12-year-olds.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Didn’t especially like Deep Purple. Did especially love the album Machine Head. I scored a pristine copy of the vinyl several years ago, at Everybody’s Records. It’s among my favorite OG discs. This tune rocks.