THE BROO VIEW with Ken Broo

Good Monday Morning!

Five games into this season, what have we learned about your Cincinnati Reds? In a word: nothing. True story: I bumped into a guy at Kroger last night and he asks me, “well,, what is Dusty going to do to shake up things up?” I was like, ‘huh’. Shake things ups? It’s been four games. Like he should go out and sign Javy Valentin and go find Jacque Jones? It’s four game. What we know about this team is the same things we’ve suspected ever since the end of last season. It has young pitching and young pitching is going to look great some days and other days it’s going to look like what Edinson Volquez looked like Wednesday night.

It’s going to have trouble scoring runs. Well, you’re saying, wait a minute Ken, they scored eight on Thursday and six Wednesday night. Yeah, but most of that offense is Joey Votto. 20-total RBI so far in five games, seven off the bat of Votto. Jay Bruce isn’t hitting, Roberto Hernandez isn’t hiting, Alex Gonzalez is still looking for his first base hit and Willy Taveres has been hacking up a lung since the end of spring training.

For all this talk of pitching, speed and defense, here’s what four games have given us: three errors, two stolen bases and a staff ERA of 6.50. The team is hitting .218. Only four teams are hitting worse. But what does it mean?

It means the Reds have gotten off to a slow start. Not good, when you look at the schedule and see an overwhelming majority of their early season games are against division opponents. Those, of course, are the games you have to win because it not only benefits you, it hurts the teams that are chasing the same thing you are, a division title.

But shake things up? I don’t care what kind of team you have and what kind of first week you’ve put together, call me in six weeks. Six weeks is about the right amount of time for analysis. Six weeks after a season begins, you’ve played between 30-35 games, almost a quarter of the season. It’s not time to panic. It’s not time to shake things up. Harang pitched well on Opening Day, but lost. Volquez pitched awful and lost. Arroyo pitched OK and got a lot of runs. And for the most part, Cueto pitched well Saturday. Harang was terrific in Sunday’s win.

The hitting, aside from Votto, isn’t happening. We knew that could be a problem. My guess is, they’ve told Johnny Gomes don’t go out of cell phone range. My guess is, Castellini will give his GM the green light to go buy a bat if the Reds are in it by late July. My guess is the Pirates aren’t as good as they’ve looked this season and the Reds aren’t as bad as they’ve looked this week. Time to panic? Dude, this is baseball. It’s not like you’ve entrusted your life savings to Bernie Madoff. That would be time to panic.