Time flies when the Cincinnati Reds are having fun

A brief and terribly unscientific trip through a recent Google search tells me that it has been exactly 9,999 days since October 6th, 1995. It’s a date that, at the time, nary a one of us observed with any real significance, with perhaps the exception of actor Brett Gelman, who surely enjoyed celebrating his 19th birthday in style somewhere.

Ron Gant had a day. So, too, did Boomer Wells, turning in the kind of ace-level performance that was expected of him when he became the big-time trade deadline acquisition of the Cincinnati Reds earlier that summer. In all, the Reds spent October 6th, 1995 putting a hurtin’ on Hideo Nomo and the Los Angeles Dodgers, sprinting past them by the score of 10-1 to sweep their former NL West rivals out of the National League Division Series.

Whether or not that was 9,999 days ago or yesterday was, we’ve entered a 24-hour window in which we will celebrate 10,000 days passing since the Reds last won a playoff series. That was pointed out to us on Twitter earlier today, precisely the kind of thing that makes Twitter a salvageable enterprise despite its current owner’s best attempts at running it completely into the ground.

We’re often salty around these parts. Just as often, we’re salty with the kind of toxicity that would make the Great Salt Lake envious. I’m going to do my best to file that saltiness into a smaller manila folder going forward and embrace the fact that the Reds, once again, are aiming for something big a bit down the road, but every now and then the ignominy simply needs to be glorified, and this is one of those instances.

10,000 days. Somewhere, even a Seychelles tortoise is saying ‘damn, that’s a really long time.’