Aristides Aquino Thumped While The Thumping Was Good

Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball. This almost certainly works better for people like me—people who will calm themselves, on a crowded train platform or in a stormy emotional moment, by rotating the concept of a guy who hits .217 with 34 homers in their mind—than it does for Reds fans. Recent Reds seasons each contain a high potency of Guys. Scott Schebler hit 30 homers for the Cincinnati Reds in 2017; he was done in the Majors by 2021, when he struck out in half of his 34 plate appearances with the Angels. Scooter Gennett and his Universal Baseball Association-ass name hit 27 homers for that team as well. Adam Duvall hit 31, Zack Cozart 24. They won 68 games. This is just what the Reds have been like: bad, loud, and weird. Duvall had a solid but bizarrely intermittent career; Schebler and Cozart were never good big-leaguers again, although they were both inevitably Angels before it was all over. By 2019, they had been replaced by another wave of Reds Guys. Yasiel Puig, already careening down the shoulder of his MLB career at age 28, hit 22 homers for the team that year. Derek Dietrich hit 19, and finished with a delectable .187/.328/.462 slash line. We used to make things in this country. That team won 75 games. All of the above are Reds Guys. All teams converge toward the mean over time, and moving into the dinger-positive Great American Ball Park in 2003 made the Reds notably more like this by dint of that home stadium's dimensions. But it goes back further than that. Players who dodged the beefy turds of Marge Schott's untrained dogs at a previous Cincinnati ballpark—Glenn Braggs or Kal Daniels or whoever you like—are all part of the long lineage of players who mashed some taters to no great effect for otherwise unremarkable Reds teams. That they were all literally Reds guys does not diminish the extent to which they were, vibrationally speaking, Reds Guys. If Three True Outcomes icon Adam Dunn is something like the prototypical Reds Guy in terms of half-empty and mostly thwarted thump, he is also standing on the shoulders of giants with unsustainable swing-and-miss rates.

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