Another day, another brutal loss to the Milwaukee Brewers by the Cincinnati Reds.

Poor defense, timely disasters, and the requisite all the right moves from their National League Central rivals set the stage for Saturday’s 6-5 defeat in extra innings, and it seems like ages since the Reds have been able to get the better of the Brewers for even one given day.

It’s been damn near a decade through multiple managers and they still can’t figure out Christian Yelich, who at least got somewhat ‘figured out’ by the rest of the league for a few years. Andruw Monasterio has 6 career homers across a trio of seasons in the big leagues, and 2 of them have come at the expense of the Cincinnati Reds. Both have come in big spots in tiny Great American Ball Park, and at this juncture of this particular sentence it shouldn’t surprise you in the slightest that the 10 ribbies he has in his career against the Reds are his most against any single team.

It hasn’t been a one-off thing. It’s been multiple series across multiple seasons in multiple states in multiple scenarios, and the Milwaukee Brewers just keep finding a way to be better than the Cincinnati Reds. They are better than the Cincinnati Reds, and it’s been that way in every single 9-inning sample for a long, long time.

Sunday’s series finale doesn’t seem so much about the Reds being able to ‘salvage a game’ in a lost series. It doesn’t even seem like it’s about ‘getting back to 5 games over .500 and staying in the Wild Card race.’

Sunday’s series finale seems like the perfect chance for a tone-setting, fundamental change in the narrative about the club with some 38 games remaining in the 2025 season. In essence, they get one shot today to show the world – and themselves, more importantly – that they can shed the monkey on their back and actually take it to the Brewers for a full 9 innings, something that they’ve shown time and time again they have not been capable of doing.

Get over this hump and the rest of the way seems a lot easier.

Lose (again) to them today and a path to the postseason seems a lot more difficult since there’s one team out there you basically know – or at least have firmly in your mind – that you cannot ever beat.

It’s also worth noting that the Reds finish their 2025 season on the road in – you guessed it – Milwaukee for a 3-game series, one that may well be the final dagger in their season’s heart if they go there having not yet figured out how to defeat them.

First pitch today will be fired at 1:40 PM ET by All-Star lefty Andrew Abbott, and the Reds have never needed him to pitch like his ace-self more than today.