(Photo by Michael Coghlan/Flickr)

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s pretty traumatizing, in the baseball arena, anyway, to be told your best player is undergoing surgery, and will be out three to four weeks. Yet, if you didn’t tell an outside observer about Joey’s absence, she might never notice.

The Reds are 7-2 since Votto’s last appeared in the reds lineup, with 38 runs scored and 27 runs against in 9 games. That 4.22 R/G scored, is about equivalent to the Reds season mark, and just a hair under the league average, while the Reds pitching, holding opponents to 3 runs per game, has obviously been outdoing itself, significantly overperforming their season average, which was already impressive.

Obviously that 38-27 run differential doesn’t quite get us to a 7-2 record from a Pythag perspective. It actually comes out to a little under 6 wins, though, so it’s not that far off. That’s the other great thing about this period – I’m perfectly happy to get a little lucky right now. The wins don’t get taken away, and you we won’t need the luck when everyone’s personal hero returns to the lineup.

It’s also impressive in it’s own way that the Reds hitters have maintained a reasonable run scoring rate without the Votto who was leading the league in a whole laundry list of statistics a few days before his surgery (and several even now). Individual numbers after the break:

I think BP is the only who’s been really consistently hot, with a solid resurgence from Rolen, and a return to only sucking a little + one really great game for Stubbs. But we have had some big games from individual players that were really important to our success – like Xavier Paul’s game last night.