CINCINNATI — After 54 games, the Reds know where they stand in the National League Central.
They are a middling team that has enough talent to win four or five in a row which they’ve done three times this season. They’re also a team capable of losing series to last place teams, including Pittsburgh and the Chicago White Sox.
And over this past weekend, they lost two of three to the best team in the NL Central. The infuriating part is for the majority of all three against the Cubs, they were the better team, racing out to four and five-run leads.
But the Cubs demonstrated what the Reds thought they would be coming into the season under new manager Terry Francona – a team capable of making fundamental plays in late-inning situations, stringing together grinding at-bats, making it tough on the opposing pitcher and exerting their will.
The Reds allowed 11 runs over the final three innings Friday and lost 13-6. They allowed seven runs in the seventh and eighth Sunday and fell, 11-8. Chicago’s three-run seventh began with none on and two out against Graham Ashcraft.
Chicago’s eighth-inning, four-run rally began with the second solo homer of the game from a third-string catcher who was toiling in the minors just 12 hours earlier and was called up for an injury to Miguel Amaya and then started because the other catcher – Carson Kelly – fell ill just 90 minutes before the game.
Reese McGuire hit an 0-2 curve from Nick Lodolo just beyond the reach of Will Benson in right in the second inning and a 1-2 sweeper from Taylor Rogers in the eighth. McGuire, a left-handed batter, had little trouble hanging in there against a pair of Cincinnati southpaws.
“Some lineups make you pay for mistakes more than others,” Francona said. “This is a good lineup and they feel really good about themselves right now. We just made mistakes. Sometimes you make them against other lineups that you don’t pay as much. These guys, when they got a mistake out over the plate, they hit it out of the ballpark.”
Cubs manager Craig Counsell spoke of the pick-me-up the Cubs got from a third-string catcher who made the most of his opportunity at just the right time. First place teams seem filled with these stories and anecdotes.
“I think when one of your key contributors goes down, and you feel like you’re probably going to miss him for a little bit. It’s bad news, and it can feel like you’ve created a hole, so to speak, without one of your guys,” Counsell said. “But we’ve had a number of guys from Triple-A step up, whether it be Chris Flexon and Reese McGuire, so those guys down there are doing an excellent job, or staff down there is an excellent job keeping those getting those guys prepared. And I think they see what’s going on here, and I think they see that they can be part of something pretty special, and they’re taking advantage of it.”
In Friday’s loss and in Sunday’s defeat, the Reds had their two best starting pitchers on the mound. Hunter Greene was worked over for 37 pitches in the fourth inning Friday after his team gave him a 4-0 lead. Nick Lodolo gave up two in the first and one in the second but left after five innings with an 8-3 lead.
If you want to start with a reason why the Reds couldn’t close out those two critical games, both pitchers need to stay on the mound longer. Greene threw 83 pitches in four innings coming off a groin injury. Lodolo threw 91 in five innings Sunday. Relying on a bullpen to get 18 outs Friday night and 15 more on Sunday is too much. Terry Francona knows this. You start stretching the likes of Scott Barlow, Ian Gibaut, Taylor Rogers, Brent Suter, Graham Ashcraft and Tony Santillan too far.
Those pitchers in specific roles and in the right leverage spots are effective. But like anything, overexpose them and they become a weakness. Good teams, like Francona said, have a way of making you expose your weaknesses. Whether it’s Matt McLain not taking the out Friday night in the seventh inning or Scott Barlow allowing a run on a two-out wild pitch before the final out was made, the Reds made critical mistakes at the wrong time against a superior team.
The Reds offense did enough – at least in the early parts of these games – to put the team in a position to close out. Their starting pitching didn’t allow them to do that.
Andrew Abbott gave Francona 5 2/3 innings Saturday and that was just enough as the bullpen allowed only single runs in the seventh, eighth and ninth.
The Reds this season have been a study in inconsistency. They are the classic case of a team getting great pitching and not scoring and getting more than enough offense and not getting the pitching. The Reds haven’t put it together and that’s why they’re 26-28 and languishing in third place, tied with Milwaukee in the NL Central.
The Cubs have a relentless offense with a starting staff that knows if it gets through five or six innings and keeps the game reasonably close, their offense will beat the opposing bullpen. That’s what they demonstrated over the weekend. The Reds have a lot of hope and potential in their batting order. For the first seven weeks, they’ve had the pitching but very sporadic hitting. The offense and pitching picked a terrible time for role reversal over the weekend.
There’s still plenty of time for the Reds to pull it all together but will they? They were shown the playbook over the weekend. Now, it’s time to start showing they’ve been paying attention.
