Mark Freaking Reynolds

I taped the Orioles game tonight and avoided any media that might alert me to the score of a game that actually means a lot in August for this ball club. The Birds are in the thick of a chase for that coveted expansion position in the wildcard. 


And so my eyeballs just about boiled out of my head when I looked at the game. First off, why is Lew Ford playing? Why is Matt Wieters hitting clean-up? Why did Joel Peralta make Mark Reynolds look like such a stooge in crunch time, with ducks on the pond?


Probably because these are the things I know about Mark Reynolds:

• I can strike him out. Yes, despite the fact that I played my last good baseball an actual eighteen years ago, and I have a noodle arm and little-to-no rising action on my two-seamer, he can't hit me. He couldn't touch my good stuff. I actually sort of believe that...
• If America could harvest the wind generated by this guy's swings and simply engineer a decent set of Reybines (Reynolds turbines, for the slow) we could look positively at a bright future of energy security. He'll be striking out like this for years.
• Capital Punishment. We should hire Mark Reynolds to take a Louisville Slugger upside our capital criminals' domes. I say this as a person that doesn't endorse the death penalty. I say we shackle these terrible blights on humanity and bury them in sand up to their shoulders. Then, put an executioner's hood on Mark Reynolds and let him take a cut at their exposed heads. Nobody perishes, but they probably get a good scare. Put them back in their cells and let them rot. Reynolds will have an 0-4 day, with three punchouts (the fourth will be a minor concussion).

Man, I love the Orioles. And I actually like Mark Reynolds as a player (when he was with Arizona, and he swiped bags and hit bombs, and .203 wasn't really an issue). I sincerely hope he gets it turned around.

But that at-bat in the eighth inning tonight killed me. Yeah, you struck out before that, but you had a freaking chance and you had a 2-0 count and you just farted it all away.

The Orioles are on the cusp, but we can't do it with this lineup. C'mon, Buck! Figure this stuff out...