Orioles and Reds reach back in time with a series that matters
This is the time of year when we depend on baseball. For the next two months, it's basically the only thing going on.
I used to have Major League Soccer, but its decision to dedicate its entire schedule to Apple TV has left me with only one free sports viewing option. I'm not a fervent enough homegrown soccer fan to spend on a streaming service. It's baseball or nothing.
And so, your baseball team must have remained relevant into the start of July. It is your lifebuoy. Otherwise, a sports fan is adrift. Is there anything drearier than a baseball team already out of contention by now and hopeless to recover for the duration?
Well, that's what the people in Cincinnati and Baltimore have been dealing with forever. They are small markets with negligent ownerships and fans most of whom have long since quit caring.
Until 2023.
Earlier this week, we had an interleague series beginning at Camden Yards between the Reds and Orioles that actually mattered. Based on the past three decades, that sounds like a sick joke, but it's not. The Orioles won 10-3 Monday amid intermittent rain and strengthened their record to an astounding 48-29. Even after sputtering through a 5-5 stretch against mostly tepid competition, they are looking good to make the AL postseason
in some stage or another.
They have somehow cobbled together a viable lineup with the second-to-least expensive payroll in MLB. Built around the opportunistic A Team of young catcher Adley Rutschman and outfielders Austin Hays and Anthony Santander and refreshingly tidy defense, the Orioles have dug themselves from decades of despair to post the thirdbest record in baseball. Nothing about the team overpowers, it just wins. And considering that Baltimore played .325 ball over four consecutive seasons (2018-21), that is news.
As for the visitors, I can't think of a story quite like it. Other than possibly Pittsburgh, no National League organization has generated less hope over the past three decades than Cincinnati. It hasn't simply been the lack of
excitement, but the utter absence of any promise there ever would be again. And I can tell you, having lived there during the glory days of the 1970s, no development in professional sport could be sadder. The populace used to sweat baseball out its pores every summer.
But ever since free agency took hold in the late `70s, the Reds have embodied the demise of the once-proud smallmarket franchise in a sport without a viable salary cap, tied to the pecking order of local broadcast revenue. They've gone more than a quarter-century without winning a single postseason series.
Their ownerships, beginning with the detestable cheapskate Marge Schott in the `80s through the current low-rent Castellinis, haven't merely been absurdly frugal, they've not really even made an effort to hide the fact they don't care about winning.
Fortunately, the current Reds players do. This team was expected to lose 100 games again. But a strange alchemy has infected them, partly 20-year-old generational phenom shortstop Elly De La Cruz, partly the return from injury of elder statesman first baseman Joey Votto, partly the flawless closing of reliever Alexis Diaz, wholly an aggressive style of baserunning and balls-out play in the field. It's a gas of a team to watch.
And they are somehow propping up a shaky pitching staff that probably will cave in during the dog days, currently leading the fetid NL Central.
De La Cruz has been in the Majors a grand total of three weeks and he's already the story of the bigs.
So, Monday was an unlikely revisitation to a time when both teams were powers. Which was an awfully long time ago. The last time they met when both had winning records was the 1970 World Series. I was 13 and it was a landmark moment in my life. But also that of the arc of baseball.
It was the last time an entire World Series consisted of wholly day games — like even on weekday afternoons, so you had to rush home from the bus stop just to catch the final two or three innings. It was the first time any World Series was played on artificial turf — the Reds' new Riverfront Stadium.