NLDS – Padres vs. Reds
Reds Road to Baseball Hell: The future hasn’t yet arrived for a Reds team coming to grips with a full rebuild. The high point of the season was acquiring the corpse of Matt Harvey and watching him not revive his career but be average enough to not make the Reds look dumb for having him. They didn’t flip him at the deadline which means he might be a part of the mix in 2019, which can’t be much worse than a last-place finish in a suddenly very go
Padres Road to Baseball Hell: If a Padres season happens and no one is around to see it, did it actually happen? Signing Eric Hosmer last winter was supposed to be a move that reinvigorated a franchise doomed to be always spinning its tires. Tyson Ross was the only good thing about the pitching staff this season and was traded to the Cardinals after the non-waiver deadline. The young pieces still seem to be a year or two away from being impactful players but that’s a tune that stuck on repeat in San Diego — a city that actually deserves a ton of credit for coming out to Petco Field and supporting a ghost of a team.
Results
Game 1 – Padres 0, Reds 4
Game 2 – Padres 1, Reds 2
Game 3 – Reds 2, Padres 4
Game 4 – Reds 7, Padres 2
Winner: Reds win series, 3-1
There’s always a series in the first-round that starts while everyone is still in school or at work and ends before we realized we cared. The Reds-Padres race towards the bottom is exactly that series. Put it on at 3pm and forget about it by the time dinner rolls around, especially because it’s one of the only series that played out the way you’d have thought it might.
San Diego playing in the October Upside Down is absolutely fitting. The team is stuck in purgatory no matter what the pitching staff looks like, who the young stars on the rise are, or if a free agent is lured in. All three of those things were factors this year and nothing except a 96-loss season occurred. The pitching staff was young but terrible, Eric Hosmer signed a huge free agent contract but left the spotlight in Kansas City, and nothing went right.
Cincinnati was one-win better than the lowly Padres but at least had some pulse on offense (a .314 BABIP was good enough for Top 15 in the league) which simply wore out a Padres pitching staff that could hold virtually any lead its stagnant offense could muster.
Series MVP: Joey Votto. He’s lived to play meaningful baseball, something the Reds have never been able to deliver until now. He was everything you’d want from a veteran like him, batting .421 and batting in 6 runs over the course of the series.