SWEEEEEEP!
The recent annals of Red Reporter archives are devoid of most things Matt McLain.
Cincinnati’s resident keystoner simply hasn’t done much, if anything, worth writing about for the longest of times, first due to an oblique injury that ended his 2023 debut season early and latest due to simple underperformance. Woeful, considerate underperformance.
There was a major shoulder injury sandwiched between those two significant development, and it remains to be seen just how much McLain has needed to work his way back on the fly at the big league level through that. The reality, or at least the last 60+ games of evidence, suggests he may well have deserved the opportunity to shake of that significant rust at the minor league level for a little bit, at least.
On Sunday, we finally saw the kind of game-breaking hit that was once the dude’s calling card, this time in the form of a 2-run tater in the Bottom of the 7th against the Arizona Diamondbacks that gave the Cincinnati Reds the 4-2 lead by which they would eventually win the game. It marked a series sweep, it brought the Reds back to .500 for the season, and it even eeked McLain’s season-long OPS out of the .500’s and into the .600’s – for now.
Baseball, notorious for its streaks and swings of momentum, often has a way of having these kinds of moments of demarcation end up being just that – the start of something significant for a while. For McLain and the Reds, one can only hope that this is the kind of rust-breaking mash that catapults him back into being the kind of key cog the Reds hope he’ll be for 2025 and beyond.
McLain’s big bop backed yet another homer from Christian Encarnacion-Strand, about whom we wrote similarly projected hope just yesterday. Brady Singer was cromulent (5.0 IP, 2 ER), the bullpen held its serve, Tony Santillan stepped in for a rare save, and Jose Trevino once again bopped like the bopper nobody ever knew he was.
The end result capped a brilliant weekend for Cincinnati, who next heads to Cleveland to start a two-city road trip through the AL Central – with division powerhouse Detroit the latter stop on that journey. If they’re at (or above) the .500 mark when writing about them this time next Sunday, well, what a rock solid week it will have been.