Officially eliminated

Remember when you were little and you were never allowed to stay up to watch the West Coast games? Oh, wait, I'm too old for that - back in those days, baseball wasn't on every night. Sure, we could listen to Marty and Joe every game, but televised games were few and far between unless it was the Cubs and Braves.

I'm watching this one. I'm watching because Homer gets to pitch again. Last night, insomnia kept me up until 2am. Too bad my system didn't wait until tonight to choose to be awake. I sure hate West Coast games.

The Reds were officially eliminated after yesterday's loss. Looking back on the season, it's pretty amazing that we managed to stay in the race - I mean theoretically - until the last ten games of the season. Yeah, the whole NL Central sux, but considering we have five other teams to play in the division that amounts to what seems like half a season, we kind of played to its level. It's a real shame that Narron wasn't fired earlier in the year (like say, January) and that Wayne kept shipping the same bullpen losers in and out of Cincy instead of acquiring new arms or using some of the farmhands. The Reds lead the Majors with 27 blown saves. If we had won only half of those games, we would be buying our playoff tickets with Sausage and Chub$ fans. And those 27 games don't count blown ties like last night or the numerous times we were only down by a run or two in the late innings only to see the pen put the game out of reach.

Then there were the wasted roster spots - we still suffer through that with Jason Ellison on the bench. But think about how Chad Moeller and Juan Castro were on the bench at the same time for too many games this season. How many times did rallies die because these jokers were sent to the plate since we had no one else to pinch hit?

Bottomline is this team was mismanaged badly, and it's led to our seventh consecutive losing season. We haven't had more than three losing seasons in a row since an eleven year stint way back in 1945-1955 during war years. In the time since then, we've had two three-year losing streaks (1958-1960 and 1982-1984) and one two-year losing streak (1997-1998). Single losing seasons came in 1966, 1971, 1989, 1991, and 1993. That's it. Every other year since 1955 we've had a winning record - 33 of 46 seasons until the current streak began in 2001.

We should be more vocally angry than we are. We should picket games, storm the field, viva la revolution! Sigh...
___