Arguably the single best performance in Cincinnati Reds history in a single game took place on this date three years ago. That’s the day when the Cincinnati Reds beat the snot out of the St. Louis Cardinals at Great American Ballpark by a score of 13-1. Scooter Gennett went wild on the day, going 5-5 with 4 home runs and 10 RBI.
Gennett was the first, and still is the only Reds player to ever hit 4 home runs in a game. Hitting 4 home runs in a game is even more rare than throwing a perfect game – it’s happened just 18 times.
That was the turning point for Gennett on the season. The infielder was hitting .270/.308/.450 on the season heading into the game. Nothing terrible with that line, of course, but it wasn’t great, either. By the end of the night he was hitting .302/.336/.578. Not counting his 4-homer game, he would go on to hit .293/.344/.516 the rest of the season for the Reds, including another 20 home runs – leading to a career best 27 homers and 97 RBI.
For some fun, here’s the Redleg Nation Recap:
Recap: Scooter Gennett blasts 4 homers, collects 10 RBI in blowout win over St. Louis
And here’s the Redleg Nation Game Thread:
This was my favorite Reds moment of maybe the last five or six years.
I was down in Charlotte for a week with one of our vendors and as we were having drinks at the hotel bar it felt like every 5 minutes that my phone would go off saying Scooter hit another homer. That was a good day.
That memory feels so recent, yet so long ago. My, how things change over three years. Based off my memory alone, 2017 was a team of Reds that could hit fairly well, but that pitched horribly. In addition to Gennett, that team had Suarez, Cozart, and Votto. The latter two were All-Stars and Votto was nearly the MVP. Also, 2017 was Votto’s last truly Votto-like season. While he was an All-Star again in 2018, his numbers that year were nothing like those from the second halves of the 2015 and 2016 seasons or the entirety of 2017. The 2018 Reds as a whole were a letdown both in the pitching and hitting departments, with a few notable exceptions (Votto, Suarez, Gennett, Hernandez, Hughes). And then there’s 2019. The season where the Reds finally got the pitching, but the hitting almost disappeared entirely. Now here we sit idling the 2020 season away as days and weeks are being wasted on seemingly hopeless negotiations for an abbreviated season. Not only are players hoping to get their fair share of pay and service time for 2020, they also are worried about how free agents will be treated by teams this winter, as well as another possible lockout after the 2021 season. What we as fans wouldn’t give for players and owners to come together on an agreement right about now and restore some sense of normalcy to a country that so desperately needs it.
Watched the game live on TV and was following Game Thread here.
What I remember most was ….
The sheer randomness of it all, commented on all game long by folks here and on social media.
Per the link below, Gennett had only had like 1 hit in the last week. Coming into the game, he would have been among the least favored to hit 4 HRs in a game.
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