This is it, Reds.

You’ve got to be the best team in baseball every single day now. Can you do that?

Writers who cover every single MLB team reach this point at some juncture every season. Well, at least 29 of them do, as someone somewhere is going to cover a club that wins the whole damn thing.

Some make it to Game 4 of a League Championship Series. Some, like those of the Miami Marlins, probably hit that wall in the first week of May.

It’s become something of an annual rite of passage to reach this point with the Cincinnati Reds at some juncture shortly after the trade deadline. It’s at that point that their season isn’t totally, completely on the fritz, but is dangling perilously close to falling into the one more lost season abyss.

The Reds are there again. They just got mauled by the Kansas City Royals and placed their ace, their rotation lock on the injured list with an elbow problem, a sentence that has never, ever in my lifetime been a harbinger of good fortune.

This is it, Reds. You aren’t toast yet, but you’ve reached the point in the season where being anything other than the single best team in baseball until its final day will leave you once again on the outside looking in come playoff time. With nearly 40 games left to play, you’ve got to do something that you’ve never once been able to do at any point in the first 120+ games - play better baseball than the 29 other clubs who you’re competing against day in, day out.

Can it happen? I suppose. Freak miracles happen all the time.

Will it? Well, that’s another story.

We’ll find out beginning this evening in Toronto, as the Reds take on the Blue Jays with a hole still gaping in their starting rotation.