There has been a lot of discussion flying around both in the media and in the Reds fan community around causes for the Reds' poor showing vs those teams that are the cream of the crop in MLB.
I have a further thought, based a bit on comments from Leake and Lecure about the game yesterday, and on Doc's latest TML (which I normally ignore but it actually had a decent premise today).
What if the Reds are becoming Bungle-ized? Let me explain...
As a long suffering member of the the Bengals fan club I recall many, many, many painful games where the Bengals were basically defeated before the kickoff. Pretty much every game versus the Steelers and Ravens were that way for quite some time. The Bengals would be out there in body, but most definitely their minds were somewhere else, and the final score would often show it quite lopsidedly. They had basically already gotten to the point where they were defeated before the first snap.
Now, what if that same thought process is creeping into the minds of a number of our Reds'? I am speaking more of when they play the Cards than any of the other teams above .500 that we play. It has gotten to the point, where it seems almost as if the towel is thrown in at the first signs of adversity against the Redbirds. I honestly think that there is a defeatist attitude that is creeping up on a few of the Reds players and if Dusty or someone doesn't step up and give a Bluto style speech soon, we could be seeing alot more blowouts whenever we play Louie.
To go further, I believe a culture of winning needs to be established and maintained. I believe that Marvin Lewis over the years has been able to nurture that culture and now the Bengals believe they can beat anybody at anytime. I would like to see Dusty and his staff get that thought process firmly established in the locker room again. I feel like it has weakened a bit.
Just a (hopefully) interesting thought I have been mulling over a bit this morning.
What say you?