By Hal McCoy
It was a night during which Cincinnati Reds pitching couldn’t stop a nose bleed and a night the Reds turned grand opera into a soap opera.
After grandly beating the two best pitchers the Chicago Cubs have to offer, Jameson Taillon and Justin Steele, the Reds faced one of MLB’s worst Wednesday night in Great American Ball Park and it was a bad soap opera.
Final score: Cubs 13, Reds 4.
And the blueprint is the same. Each time the Reds approach .500, they throw in a stinker. They’ve fallen back to 52-56.
Cubs starter Kyle Hendricks started the game with a 2-9 record and a 6.95 earned run average, worst ERA in MLB for a pitcher with 60 or more innings.
The Reds, though, reacted as if they were facing Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax. He retired the first 10. In five innings, the Reds had only four hits. Three hit and three runs came in the fifth inning on Jake Fraley’s three-run homer.
It didn’t matter.
The Cubs savaged Reds starter Nick Lodolo for eight runs and 11 hits in 5 2/3 innings. They scored two in the second and four in the third.
Amazingly, Lodolo had 0-and-2 counts on each of the first four batters in the third and all four reached base and all four scored.
Before the night concluded every Cubs batter had at least one hit and they amassed 17 hits that included seven doubles and a home run.
The home run was from the last batter Lodolo faced and it was a two-out two-run home run by Ian Happ in the sixth.
Happ, historically a Reds killer in GABP, had been kept quiet this season, until Wednesday. He had three hits, a walk, scored three and drove in two.
Isaac Paredes, playing his second game since the Cubs obtained him from Tampa Bay, contributed two doubles and scored three times.
Cody Bellinger, playing his third game after coming off the injured list, had three hits, scored three and drove in two.
Number nine hitter Pete Cross-Armstrong, 4 for 33 when the night began, produced a pair of hits, drove in two and scored one.
In short, for the Cubs a good time was had by all.
And it was not a banner evening for three new Reds.
Jakob Junis, obtained from Milwaukee in the Frankie Montas trade, replaced Lodolo in the sixth. Paredes greeted him with a double and scored on Suzuki’s double.
And he gave up two more runs in the seventh on a single, walk and Cross-Armstrong’s double. In 1 1/3 innings he gave up three runs and four hits.
Ty France made his Reds debut as a pinch-hitter in the eighth and popped out. Eric Yang, called up from Class AAA Louisville earlier this week, pinch-hit in the ninth and struck out.
The Reds finished with six hit, three coming in the fifth and two in the eighth, back-to-back doubles by Santiago Espinal and Will Benson that cut the deficit from 13-3 to 13-4.
Epsinal had two of the six hits, extending his hitting streak to 11 games.
And there was another base-running gaffe by Elly
De La Cruz. He became Cincinnati’s first base runner when he doubled with one out in the fourth.
With two outs and the team trailing, 6-0, TJ Friedl drew a walk. But on ball four, De La Cruz tried to steal third. . .with two outs and the Reds down six runs.
He was thrown out and the play smacked of selfishness, just an attempt to pad his stolen base totals.
All in all, it was a night to forget for the Reds.