Bryan Price doesn’t have a whole lot of options when it comes to managing an injury-riddled, utterly hapless Cincinnati Reds‘ team.
The third-year skipper once again finds himself and his players on the wrong side of losing in a big way.
Price has watched his Reds drop a ninth straight game this year, matching the worst stretch by any team so far this season.
With a 15-31 record, the Reds stand dead last in their division and third-worst in all of baseball.
Losing streaks for the Reds’ under Price are nothing new. His 2015 Reds produced two nine-game loss streaks from games 36 through 44 and games 114 through 122.
The 2015 Price-led Reds also suffered through a whopping 13-game streak from games 148-160.
Last year’s 13-game debacle was only the fifth time in Reds’ history that a team lost that many games in a row, matching teams from 1914, 1930, 1937 and 1945. The 1914 team holds the franchise record for consecutive losses in a season with an 0-19 mark.
Last year’s excuse for losing so much in the second-half of the year was a 64-game stretch of starting rookie pitchers to end the season.
This year’s excuse so far has been a historically bad bullpen that now ranks fifth-worst all-time in ERA. with a whopping 6.53 ERA.
Price is in the final year of a contract that can’t come to a merciful end fast enough for him or the Reds.
If his tenure ended today, Price would have the eighth-worst winning percentage of all Reds’ managers. Among Reds’ managers who have remained at the helm for as long as Price has (370 games and counting), only Dan Howley compiled a worse winning percentage than the .419 recorded so far by Price.
Price may not go down as the least successful manager in all of Reds’ history given just how bad Howley’s teams were (.381 won-loss in three years). But fair or not, Price just hasn’t figured out ways to win games.
Robb Hoff writes about the Cincinnati Reds for OutsidePitch MLB. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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