I really thought we had our bases covered, in terms of allegories, with Exasperated Richard Schiff (ERS) and Basket Baby. It turns out there's at least one more category of Reds-related displeasure that lies beyond workaday frustration, but that is not equivalent to a losing streak of five games or greater. And it's whatever the Reds have been doing for the last two games, in which they've spent 18 scoreless innings leaving 18 runners on base, four of them at third base and complete with two (obviously) scoreless bases loaded situations. It's far from the worst the team has played: the pitching has been very good. But taken with yet another 1-run loss and the team's first plunge below 2-games-under-.500, it's the most irrelevant and self-defeating the Reds have seemed all season.
So bring in bus-top philosopher Timothy "Speed" Levitch, star of the 1998 documentary The Cruise:
The anti-cruise is an attempt to imprison us. At every level of living it exists. Younger cruisers have asked me, "Why?" "Why is the anti-cruise so avaricious and constant in its attempt to stop the cruise? And I have no answer. There is no answer. I mean, it's gravitational, it's a relationship that's made up of reciprocals and pulling gravities. It simply exists. Where there is cruise there is an escort of anti-cruise. But even in a bastion of anti-cruise fodder... there is cruise. Somewhere in there is a sparkle of cruising energy. Deeply sublimated, within the bellowing belly of the beast.
-- Timothy "Speed" Levitch
The Reds are deep within the grasp of anti-cruise, but there is still a sparkle of cruising energy in every runner who doesn't make it home, every soft ground-out to second base. Someone else is driving this bus, so just be glad for the grid system.