By HAL McCOY
It isn’t often that the Cincinnati Reds score nine runs and amass 14 hits when Joey Votto and Brandon Phillips combine to go 1 for 10 (an infield single by Phillips in the ninth).
That, though, is exactly what happened Sunday afternoon when the rest of the Reds scored a 9-4 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies.
After more than a week of offensive struggles by the Reds, Eugenio Suarez, Adam Duvall and Jay Bruce went on a hit splurge to help their team record only their third road win of the season against 12 defeats.
SUAREZ ENTERED THE game on a 3 for 23 slide for life, but had three hits, including a three-run home run.
Duvall reached base four straight times with three hits and a catcher’s interference.
Bruce reached base five straight times with three hits and two walks.
MIX IN THE ESCAPE wizardry of Reds starting pitcher Dan Straily and the Reds rescued the third game of the series after losing the first two.
Straily survived an eventful 109-pitch five innings, shutting out the Phillies despite giving up six hits and three walks. The Phillies had runners on base all five innings but went 0 for 9 with runners in scoring position while Straily was on the mound.
The Reds built a 7-0 lead by the fourth inning against Philadelphia starter Adam Morgan, including a five-run fourth that featured the three-run homer by Suarez.
IT BEGAN THE top of the second when the first four Reds hit safely and the Reds scored two on Duvall’s double and a single by Tucker Barnhart.
The deluge occurred in the five-run fifth when Straily drew a bases loaded walk, a run scored by a Tyler Holt ground ball and Suarez unleashed a mammoth home run over the center field wall and into the Citizens Bank Park shrubbery.
It was a rough afternoon for Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard. With a runner on base in the first inning he hit one into the right field upper deck, but a stern wind blew it foul. In the fifth he hit one headed over the center field wall but Holt went above the fence to snag it.
Holt, though, gave two runs back in the sixth with Reds relief pitcher Steve Delabar on the mound. With two men on base, Freddy Galvin drove one deep to center, near the wall. Holt had it covered, but the ball glanced off his glove. Galvis was credited with a two-run double.
THE PHILLIES ADDED a third run in the eighth against Ross Ohlendorf on a Mikael Franco single, but Ohlendorf pitched his way out of a minor mess.
Zack Cozart, another of the recently struggling Reds along with Votto, Suarez, Bruce and Phillips, wasn’t in the starting lineup, but he pinch-hit in the ninth and lobbed a two-run bases loaded single to center.
Amazingly, those two runs in the ninth were important because the Reds bullpen was up to its daily tricks.
Fortunately for the Reds, though, they built that seven-run early lead because Delabar gave up two runs, Ohlendorf gave up one and Drew Hayes furnished some ninth-inning heart palpations.
He loaded the bases and David Lough hit a ball off the upper deck façade, just a few feet foul from being a grand slam home run. Then Hayes walked Lough to force in a run, signaling Tony Cingrani time with the bases still loaded and one out.
Cingrani retired the final two without damage, but the bullpen gave up four runs, six hits and four walks.
The Reds headed for Cleveland after the game and play two against the Indians, then return home Wednesday to play two more against the Indians.