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Reds’ free fall continues

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By Hal McCoy, Staff Writer 5:43 PM Saturday, July 25, 2009

CHICAGO — While some people like to reduce baseball to a stack of numbers, it is played by men with brains, hearts, fatty tissues and varying sized biceps.

And yet some numbers don’t lie, especially in the case of the free-falling Cincinnati Reds.

After a 5-3 loss to the Chicago Cubs Saturday in Wrigley Field, some ugly and pathetic numbers are piled against the Reds:

•They are 0-5 on this trip to Los Angeles and Chicago.

•They are a season’s worst eight games under .500 at 44-52.

•They can’t hold their own against good teams like Chicago, Los Angles, Milwaukee, New York and St. Louis. Since July 3, they are 5-13 against those teams.

•And here’s a staggering number. The Cubs scored three runs in the first inning Saturday and that’s 83 runs opponents have scored in the first inning to 51 for the Reds. The second highest amount of runs in one inning against the Reds is 62 in the sixth.

Johnny Cueto is the latest starting pitcher to trip over his pitching toe. Over the last 17 games only one starter has won, two games by Bronson Arroyo — and he had to pitch 16 straight shutout innings to do it. The starters are 2-12 in those 17 games.

Now that’s a bad number.

And manager Dusty Baker wasn’t whistling the Dixieland Blues when he said, “When things go bad, when you aren’t winning, everything goes against you. Nothing goes right. All the breaks go the other way. I’ve seen it over and over.”

Saturday was no different, right from the first minute when Chris Dickerson blooped one to center to start the game. Reed Johnson tried for a diving catch and missed. Dickerson tried for second and Johnson threw him out from the seat of his grass-stained britches.

“We finally get a bloop to fall in and then we get thrown out at second,” said Baker. “That’s the way is has gone for us.”

In the bottom of the first, Dickerson tried for a running catch on Derrek Lee and it skittered past him for a triple as a run scored. Aramis Ramirez followed with a home run and it was 3-1. Game over.

Center fielder Willy Taveras and Dickerson converged on the ball and nearly collided, but Taveras backed off at the last moment.

“That ball was in No Man’s Land,” said Baker. “When the ball went up, it was not high enough for anybody to be sure enough to call for it. You couldn’t have thrown a ball out there better than that. That’s No-Man’s Land. A bad break for us and a big break for them.”

No Man’s Land. Right now the Reds have squatter’s rights on it right now.

The Reds had a runner on third with two outs in the fourth when Edwin Encarnacion shot one up the middle. Pitcher Kevin Hart stuck up his bare hand and stabbed it and threw the first for the out.

“The pitcher catches that ball barehanded and that’s another sign you are in a bad way,” Baker said. “That’s a base hit and a run. Pitchers are taught not to stick up their pitching hand. He does it and doesn’t injure himself and saves a run.

“We’re in a bad way,” said Baker. “We’re not playing very good and a lot of things aren’t going our way right now.”

Of the bad first innings, Baker said, “Those things get in your head sometimes. Sometimes there is no explanation. When you are in a bad way, these things happen. You search for clues, but you don’t find any.”

Joey Votto and Jonny Gomes hit solo home runs in the ninth, but that was cosmetics applied to the ugliness.

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