The RHM crew were there in Spring Training for one of Aroldis Chapman’s appearances. And we caught one of his performances with the Bats when they stopped by Indianapolis. We weren’t in Cincinnati for his Major League debut last night, but we were glued to the television. Dusty Baker said it best, “We weren’t disappointed.”

No, no we were not.

Aroldis Chapman came on in the 8th with the Reds holding a comfortable 8-3 lead. It was the perfect opportunity for him to get his feet wet, and if he wasn’t sharp, the damage could be controlled. There was no need for damage control. Chapman’s first pitch was a 98 mile-per-hour fastball strike to Jonathan Lucroy. Next was an 86 mph slider that Lucroy swung and missed at, followed by fouling off a 102 mph fastball, before striking out on another 86 mph slider. Lucroy just became Chapman’s first big league strikeout.

Chapman’s pitch count ended up being 8 for his inning of work. 7 of them were strikes. After the initial strikeout, he got groundouts from Craig Counsell and Carlos Gomez, all while continuously throwing 100 mph or above.

What a debut. The crowd was on their feet for the 8th inning, to see the marvelous Cuban pitching phenom. And I sat at home, visions of Chapman mowing down postseason opposition in my head. A long time ago I worried about Chapman getting some terrible injury before he ever made it to Cincinnati and how hard I thought it would be to be the people in charge of deciding when Chapman was called up. Kudos to them. They’ve done a perfect job.

In what’s becoming a recurring theme of the 2010 season for the St. Louis Cardinals, Tony La Russa is again complaining about something that happened in the game against the Washington Nationals yesterday.

In the 9th inning, Nationals rookie reliever Drew Storen lost control of a fastball when pitching to Matt Holliday. The pitch sailed behind the batter. La Russa said, “If somebody throws the ball behind you, you’re not happy. Especially up in that area. If you don’t have that kind of command, it wasn’t intentional, then you don’t belong in this league.”

La Russa has made similar complaints before. I remember him making even harsher statements once when Reds pitcher Aaron Harang threw a wild pitch. Strangely, I never hear of other teams managers making the same criticisms when Cardinals pitchers throw wild pitches.

Of course, this is coming from a manager with a DWI on his record. I could make a cheap shot about how someone who can’t control their alcohol consumption doesn’t belong in the league. However, I’ll instead sit back and enjoy the Cardinals meltdown this year. For all of their “bitching and moaning” seems to do nothing more than cause them to lose focus and fall further and further behind the Reds. They lost that game to the Nationals yesterday.

One of the perks of the Cincinnati Reds Reds Heads Kids Club is that the kids get to go to one of six autograph sessions with one of the Reds players. This season, my son Winter has been interested in collecting Reds signatures on the back of his 2010 Reds Heads jersey, and yesterday was the session he chose.

The player for each of the signings is never announced too far in advance. It’s impossible to know which player will be with the team and healthy for each signing. I overheard one of the workers talking about a previous session where the player was sent down to the minors just before the signing, leaving them scrambling to find someone else. Yesterday, no such scramble occurred. A day after his first Major League home run, Chris Valaika was signing for kids club members in the Reds Hall of Fame.

Valaika’s signature gave Winter his 13th signature this year. They’ve been collected all over, including Reds Caravan stops, Spring Training, and Opening Night. If he wants to do the same thing next year, we’ll definitely want to spend some time with him at RedsFest.

Boxscore

The St. Louis Cardinals have been having a terrible time of it lately. First, they lose a series to the last-place Pittsburgh Pirates. Yesterday, they headed to Washington, D.C. to take on the last-place Washington Nationals and again fell. Although this time, it took them 13 innings to lose.

Chris Carpenter, who will no doubt have difficulty explaining the loss to his child, started for the Cardinals. If it weren’t for the unearned runs, he would have had a quality start, as he pitched 6 innings and allowed 3 earned runs. Unfortunately, Felipe Lopez is an everyday player for St. Louis. And as Reds fans remember all too well, he can have problems throwing the ball, as he did in the 3rd, which led to 3 unearned runs scoring.

St. Louis did take the lead back after that error, thanks to Albert Pujols’ 400th career home run. But it wasn’t enough. Carpenter and the bullpen could not keep the Nationals from scoring. Going into the top of the 9th, Washington was ahead 8-6. It was time for another of the Cardinals patented come-this-close-to-winning comebacks.

Except that this time, the Cardinals actually did take the lead. Brendan Ryan doubled in a run, Matt Holliday was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded to tie it, and then Randy Winn drove in a go-ahead run and an insurance run with a single.

It wasn’t enough for closer Ryan Franklin, though, who allowed the Nationals to tie it on a 2-run shot by Roger Bernadino. The game went into extras and nobody scored until the bottom of the 13th when Ian Desmond hit the walk-off single.

The loss drops the Cardinals to 4 games behind the first-place Reds. They have now lost 3 in a row. Most troubling may be that 2 of those games were started by their big guns–Adam Wainwright and Carpenter. Their record for their last 10 is 3-7.