By Hal McCoy
The wait was not worth it for the Cincinnati Reds Friday night in PNC Park.
Weather delayed the game’s start for an hour and 17 minutes and when it commenced the Reds wished it hadn’t.
The Reds encountered an angry band of Pittsburgh Pirates and suffered a 9-1 defeat.
And for the second time in less than a week, the Reds suffered the indignity of using catcher Jose Trevino to pitch the eighth inning.
When last seen, Trevino pitched the eighth inning in Great American Ball Park and gave up five runs and six hits during a 13-2 loss.
He entered Friday’s fray with a 45.00 earned run average, but this time he walked one batter and retired the other three, including a strikeout of Marcell Ozuna, lowering his earned run average to 22.50.
It was the best pitching of the night for a Reds pitcher.
The defeat knocked the Reds out of first place in the National League Central, a half-game behind the Chicago Cubs.
The Pirates had lost five straight, including the last four at home to the St. Louis Cardinals.
Pittsburgh unloaded four home runs that traveled 1,169 feet, an average of 417 feet.
To add insult, when the Pirates hit a home run, the guy who hit it is crowned in the dugout with an orange traffic cone.
The cone was stolen from a Cincinnati street when the Pirates were in Cincinnati earlier this season.
They ripped into starter Brady Singer and newly-arrive Zach Maxwell en route to a 12-hit night. And they left a lot of loose change on the basepaths, stranding 11 runners.
Catcher Henry Davis hadn’t homered all season. He hit two.
Designated hitter Marcell Ozuna hadn’t had an extra base hit since April 15. He homered.
And then there was Bryan Reynolds. When he sees red, he erupts against the Reds.
He started the rout with two outs in the first inning against Singer. He homered with a 443-foot blast that dented the batter’s eye in straighaway center.
Reynolds struck again in the third after Singer walked the first hitter, Davis, then with two outs Reynolds tripled on a line drive that right fielder Spencer Steer just missed with a dive.
Reynolds scored on Ryan O’Hearn’s line single to right and the Pirates led, 3-0.
Reynolds had the two toughest parts of a cycle with the homer and triple in his first two at bats. He just needed a double and a single for the cycle, but went 0-forj-2 with a walk his last three at bats.
Davis crushed his first homer with one out in the fourth and when Singer gave up a double to Oneil Cruz, Singer’s short, cold night was done.
The Reds had won five of Singer’s six starts this season, but the Pirates are not a good match-up for him. He has now lost four straight decisions to the Pirates.
Maxwell made his season’s debut in the third and ended the inning with no further damage.
But his second inning, the fifth, was catastrophic:
Walk to Nick Gonzales, who has reached base in 12 straight games.
A 425-foot home run by Ozuna.
A single by 19-year-old rookie Konnor Griffin.
A second home run of the night, a 385-footer by Davis.
Four runs in the inning and an 8-0 deficit.
While all the Pittsburgh mayhem was going on, the Reds were unarmed against Pirates starter Mitch Keller.
He held the Reds to one run and three hits over seven innings, two of the hits produced by TJ Friedl.
Keller, a right-hander with a full pocket of different pitches, hasn’t given up an extra base hit to any right-handed hitter over the 41 innings of his seven starts.
Keller is 3-1 with a 2.85 ERA, a wise investment for the Pirates, who signed him to a five-year $77 million deal.
Friedl singled with two outs in the third. He led the sixth with a double up the right-center gap and scored the Reds’ only run when he moved to third on Matt McLain’s dribbler out in front of the plate and scored on Elly De La Cruz’s grounder to second.
It was Pittsburgh’s third win in four games against the Reds after the Pirates took two of three from the Reds earlier this season at Great American Ball Park.
The Reds, seeking their sixth straight series win, arrived in Pittsburgh with an 8-2 record in series openers. Now it’s 8-3.