The Cincinnati Reds season turnaround begins today at Wrigley Field

Or, it doesn’t. Who am I to know?

If it feels like this Cincinnati Reds season a) got off to a rather raucous start, b) cratered hard thereafter, and c) hasn’t yet featured a single game between the Reds and Chicago Cubs, well, that’s exactly what this season actually is.

Here we stand, on the final day of May, and the Reds and Cubs will finally be getting together to play the game of baseball. Or, rather, they’ll get together and play whatever the heck it is they’ve been actually playing for the last month and a half.

Since the Reds completed a three-game sweep of the Los Angeles Angels on April 21st, they’ve won exactly one series. The offense in that time has been so putrid it’s hard to truly fathom – since April 22nd, they rank last or second to last in average, slugging percentage, OPS, hits, doubles, runs, RBI, wOBA, wRC+, ISO, fWAR (from position players), hard-hit rate, swag, coolness, attitude, and height.

Maybe not height, but potentially height. It’s been a really, really cruddy run.

Thing is, a look at those standings from that particular date reveals something about the Chicago Cubs, too. They rank fifth to last in runs scored in that span, their OPS and wOBA is third worst, and their 26.5% hard-hit rate is actually dead last – worse than Cincinnati’s very comparable 26.8% by a hair.

In other words, this is not the powerhouse of the NL Central that the Cubs hoped for when they splashed cash on Cody Bellinger and Shota Imanaga last winter. They sit a game under the .500 mark, and fortunately for the Reds, they won’t even see Imanaga in this series.

You could say that this, after a nice little day off, could be he perfect time for the start of Cincinnati’s climb out of the doldrums of the NL Central cellar. Whether or not they can actually turn that into action remains a very, very large question mark, but if ever there was a time for a reset it’s this.

TJ Friedl is back. It’s 75 degrees and sunny on the north side of Chicago, and there’s a nice little 9 mph southerly wind blowing out to left field. Graham Ashcraft is a large human being. Italian beef sandwiches are good.

It’s a good time for the Reds to do some familiar baseball knockin’ in Chicago, and that just so happens to be what’s next on the docket: a Friday afternoon day game at Wrigley, where the beer flows like wine and the bathroom troughs smell like the poorly sloped crawl space of a 1950’s mid-century modern home.

First pitch is at 2:20 PM ET.

Reds Lineup

Cubs Lineup