Sports Today: Reds renew hope, Ohio State gets big boost and what’s going on in Cleveland?

Credit: Tom Szczerbowski

Credit: Tom Szczerbowski

Believe it or not, the Cincinnati Reds won a baseball game last night. An interleague game, no less!

Their 7-3 victory in Tampa Bay is another reminder this team is worth waiting around to see what it can do with competent starting pitching, too.

They took a 3-0 lead, lost it, then went right back to work offensively.

RELATED: Reds snap 9-game losing streak with win over Rays

Joey Votto went 3 for 5 and drove in the winning run while Jesse Winker had a two-run single in his first day back in the majors.

Scott Feldman allowed two runs on six hits in six innings. Can’t ask for anything more than that. Michael Lorenzen blew a save but got the win that was nailed down by Raisel Iglesias.

Via MLB.com:

"The reality of it is, no one expects us to do much this year, except our club. I think everyone wants to stay in it and see what happens as we get healthy," Reds manager Bryan Price said. "You just can't get so far out of it. Our good fortune is that the division hasn't had a ton of separation. We never just play out the season, but you want all of the games to mean something.

"We have to play good ball in order to really stay relevant in this thing and be able to get ourselves back in it with a nice winning streak. That made the win all the more satisfying."

Tonight we’ll see if Amir Garrett can give them a good opportunity to get a winning streak going…

Ohio State basketball got some big news last night with the announcement Kyle Young will be a Buckeye. 

A four-star forward from Massillon Jackson who signed with new coach Chris Holtmann at Butler, he gained his release from the Bulldogs and opted to follow Holtmann to Columbus.

All of a sudden, Ohio State has the top two players in the state for 2017 (along with four-star center Kaleb Wesson of Westerville South) while Holtmann and his staff work feverishly to lock down some of the in-state stars in a loaded 2018 class.

🔴🏀 pic.twitter.com/IsHYofMr0W— Kyle Young (@kyleyoung_35) June 19, 2017

Isn’t it amazing how quickly fortunes can change these days in college basketball?

It feels like the wild, wild west out there sometimes with player movement so much more prevalent now than it was just a few years ago.

Along with the explosion of the grad-transfer movement, it also seems to me like more prospects are waiting until the late signing period to make their final decision and releasing recruits from their scholarships when coaches move on (as happened with Holtmann and Young) has become more the rule than the exception.

RELATED: What Chris Holtmann can learn from Kevin McGuff about jumpstarting Ohio State basketball

The result is there are a lot more good players out there after the regular season ends than there use to be. If that’s bad for the casual fan, it’s great for hardcore followers of the Buckeyes who were wondering how they might win many games next season.

Same is true for Dayton, where Anthony Grant lost some of Archie Miller’s guys but was able to add a couple of players with potential to his roster that could change the scope of his first season leading the Flyers…

Meanwhile, there seems to be much less certainty what is going on with what has been the most successful basketball team in the state recently as the Cleveland Cavaliers parted ways with general manager David Griffin.

This has put a lot of chum in the water for the people itching to write about LeBron James ditching his hometown team again next summer, but I’m not buying that.

Remember as this soap opera ramps up over the next 12 months, most of the people writing about James leaving again never seriously thought he would come back to Ohio — probably in no small part because they spend as little time thinking about flyover country as they can.

I value the perspective of local people more in this case.

That said, basketball was of course the major factor in his return three years ago. It’s no coincidence Cleveland offered him not only the chance to come home but a situation in which he could (with the help of Griffin) construct another super team once it had become obvious his Heat were finished.

Although James isn’t exactly known for being a PR genius, I can’t see him leaving again unless there is another clearly better basketball opportunity out there. And maybe not even then.

He’s obsessed with building a winner (to the point he has frequently pushed his teams into bad moves, in all honesty), but he’s also got an expanding list of off-court interests and all kinds of roots in Northeast Ohio that are going to be growing long after his career is over.

He probably knows deep down his chances of getting to six titles are extremely small, so maybe selling his soul again to keep up the chase it isn’t going to be worth it.

(I didn’t major in psychology, but sometimes we have to pretend in this business, right?)

I’m certainly not going to undersell Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s chances of ruining everything, of course.

As with anything, time will tell.

Regardless, it should be a fascinating week in the NBA with the draft coming up and teams trying to position themselves to be less worse than the Warriors.

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