Unless they hate their job and want to be fired, no one working for MLB would put the Reds on the ESPN Sunday night game. Consequently, I never see the Reds on Monday mornings because the game is over by the time I wake up over here. Usually I get up, drink a few glasses of water and check the box score of the game. If it’s close, or if anything interesting happened, I’ll bring it up on MLB.com and browse an inning or two.

That was the case today. The Reds lost 8-3 to the Mets. No surprise there, but then I saw that the Reds had made an out in the top of the ninth by batting out of order. I was curious how it went down and what the reaction of the announcers was. My own reaction was: I wonder if the Reds could get away with firing Dusty Baker just a couple months after hiring him.

Unfortunately, the feed being carried on MLB.com wasn’t the Reds. Instead it was Keith Hernandez and (I believe) Gary Cohen of the Mets. I went ahead and watched the Reds bat in the ninth inning. Indeed Dave Ross batted out of turn. As Ross walked to the plate Corey Patterson’s stats flashed onto the screen for a half-a-second.

Director of the Mets broadcast: “Patterson’s not at bat, asshole!”

Producer at Mets board: “Oops.”

But no, indeed it was Patterson who should have been coming to the plate. I wish I could say watching this transpire was interesting. It wasn’t. The ordeal took some 20 minutes and I watched only to hear some validation of my “fire Dusty” thoughts. At one point Hernandez said “This really does reflect poorly on the Cincinnati Reds,” which fed my pain a little.

Living in Korea I’m more sensitive to public shame than I used to be. Especially in regards to elders, who I think should, for the most part, be allowed to save face.  Seeing Baker walk onto the field to get clarification from the umpire was hard to watch. This was a boneheaded little league move. A disgrace. And it’s not the kind of thing that anyone but the manager can be blamed for. It’s the sort of thing that happens when bad manager is managing a bad team and even though it’s early May — no one gives a shit anymore.

Incidentally I’ve seen Baker do something like this before — when he was managing the Cubs. At that time he made a double-switch but didn’t inform the umpire. Dave Miley, the Reds manager at the time,  had been thrown out of the game and future Reds manager Jerry Narron caught it and notified the umpire.

It’s funny because that was the sort of attention to detail that in part  got Narron hired. I’ll bet that at the time the move really impressed some of the Reds top brass. Evidently they forgot who was on the other end of it when they hired Baker after firing Narron.

There are Reds fans who defended the hiring of Baker, but none were excited by the idea. I suppose there is some level of casual fan in Cincinnati who recognized Baker’s name from when he was a player and thought “well, at least I know this guy’s name” and was satisfied. But to even think that is to underestimate the intelligence of the people of Cincinnati. Evidently the Reds do.

Anyone watching the Reds regularly knows this team is a mess. In recent weeks Baker’s lineups have resembled lotto cards, looking like they were devised with some kind of randomization tool. He’s abandoned his  dumb ideas of having speedy aggressive hitters up top who are  followed by aggressive spray hitters followed by  power guys, and is now just trying anything in hopes that it’ll stick.  It took over a month of Patterson hitting leadoff and sporting an OBP in the low 200 range  for Baker to realize Ryan Freel’s OBP of over 100 points higher might be a better bet. Even still, Baker tries to get Patterson into the lineup. Well, until Sunday when he tried to have Ross illegally bat for Patterson.

He’s bat nearly every player in the No. 2 hole (Ken Griffey, Brandon Phillips, Jeff Keppinger, Freel, Joey Votto, Norris Hopper) except the one guy who should be hitting No. 2– Adam Dunn. There have been plenty of other gaffes. One time he let Johny Cueto hit with the bases loaded and two outs in the home half of the sixth inning, only to remove him after getting one out in the seventh. Just now I read the team will start Bronson Arroyo, who last week was  skipped in the rotation  and tested for injury because he was throwing so badly, on three-days rest  – I presume, because he had a good outing yesterday.

It’s a tough call in firing Baker. Unlike the last couple Reds manager firings Dusty has been around too long and earned too much respect to just jerk him out of the manager’s chair haphazardly. The team signed him to a three-year deal so there’s a delightful 2.8 years remaining. Even firing him after just one season would seemingly be bad form given that the Reds allowed each of their last two managers to start a second season before firing them.

At any rate…time for me to start watching the A’s.