Reds playing (somewhat) better!

It took damn near the entire season for the Reds to show signs that they are a professional caliber baseball team. The starting pitching over the last week and a half has shown signs of resurgence, with Aaron Harang battling through his early season woes where he was giving up 5 or more runs in entirely too many games to perform at the level you would expect from a number 1 starter!! At one point, early in the season, I recall that his ERA was over 5 at least a month into the season, and now his stats read like this: a record of 10 - 3, an ERA of 3.54, and a WHIP of 1.19. As a small baseball primer, ERA stands for earned run average and WHIP stands for walks + hits per nine innings pitched.

Since the all-star break, the Reds are 16-12 which is much better than they had been playing all season. Now, all this may just be my way of finagling the stats to make me feel better about a team that is so grossly underplaying their potential that I adopted a defeatist viewpoint long ago. Lately, however, it does seem that the pitching has tightened up and the offense is no worse than any other team really and suffers the usual amount of bad games. The last game played is a case in point.

They played the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team that is certainly far better off than the reds and in playoff contention, and Bronson Arroyo pitched 6 2/3 shutout innings! Perhaps the even greater feat is that the bullpen did not then immediately surrender the 4-0 lead the Reds had built up to that point. Though this has me high spirited about a team I know will not make the playoffs, something else has me scratching my head at the apparent defeatist attitude of the reds themselves.

A fellow blogger has reported that Jon Coutlangus (4-1, 3.93 ERA) has been optioned to the AAA farm team, while Todd Coffey (2-1, 6.04 ERA) has been allowed to remain on the team despite being sent down to Louisville earlier in the year. I confess that there may be more legitimate reasons behind this move than I am aware of, but all Cincinnati Reds fans should be scratching their collective heads about this.