CINCINNATI — Although they now shared the same address in the standings and the same distance away from a playoff berth, the viewpoints were completely opposite late Wednesday in the two clubhouses at Great American Ball Park.
Rarely has 60-61 looked so different on the same night.
After a 9-2 victory Wednesday night, the Cincinnati Reds, like their hits that decided the series, were rising up, up and all the way into a tie for second place in the National League Central, prompting buoyant infielder Jonathan India to proclaim they “are a playoff team. I think it’s the perfect time to get hot.” The Cardinals, on the other side of the ballpark and completely other side of the sensation, tumbled down, down, down into a quiet clubhouse and a losing record, which sent a familiar chill through the fan base.
The Cardinals have gone a long way since last year only to allow a complete and utter sweep by the Reds to put them back one step behind where they started.
“This series is not going to define our season,” outfielder Tommy Pham said. “There are still plenty of games left. We’re going to have to start winning.”
One day after they returned to .500 for the first time in around 50 days, the Cardinals slipped officially into the muck of a losing record. They’ve lost nine of their past 13 games and are now as far out of the division race as they’ve been since early May. The next time they face the Reds will be after 22 consecutive games against winning clubs. After going 1-4 on the two-city road trip, the Cardinals return to Busch Stadium to face the first-place Dodgers and the first-place Brewers in back-to-back three-game series.
They are playing some of their least-effective ball as the most-demanding stretch of their season arrives. They were outscored 19-4 by the Reds and they led only once in the series – for grand total of six batters. They mustered one homer as a team and zero quality starts, and during a frayed fifth inning Wednesday night they committed four misplays.
The Reds felt invigorated at 60-61.
The Cardinals had other words for being 60-61.
“It’s human nature to constantly feel frustrated when it’s like you’re fighting from behind,” said starter Kyle Gibson. “It’s human nature when you’re struggling to not play as confident and maybe have your mind wander. It happens to me on the mound from time to time when it’s not going the way you want it to go, and you’ve got to try and stay focused. It’s hard to play this game frustrated. It’s hard to play when things aren’t going your way and you’re not playing confidently. That’s also something that getting back home, having an off day, taking a breather, hitting a reset – I think can be really good for a team in our position.”
Here is a countdown of how this 3 Nights in August got them back to square minus-1:
10. The Reds hit 10 home runs in the series, including five in Wednesday’s jubilee. They overpowered the Cardinals, 10-1, in home runs for the series at a time when India remarked postgame that it’s August, it’s warm, and it’s the time of year the ball flies in Cincinnati. Just not for the Cardinals. At a ballpark famous for games flipflopping in wild swings of runs because of its size and invitation to hit home runs, the Reds got 16 of their 19 runs on homers.
The Cardinals got one.
They had two players, India and TJ Friedl, each hit two home runs Wednesday, becoming the first Reds’ tandem since 2017 with two homers (or more) in the same game.
Four of the homers came against Gibson two days after the Reds hit three off starter Sonny Gray. The first three homers hit off Gibson were on three different pitches – a cutter, a changeup, and a sweeping slider. India’s first homer seized an early 3-0 lead for the Reds and Friedl’s second homer punctuated the game by expanding the Reds’ lead in the seventh inning.
“They took some really good swings,” manager Oliver Marmol said. “They hit the ball hard. They did damage. They made us pay. We didn’t. We sprayed a couple of hits out there. Outside of that just kind of sprayed a couple of singles in there. Look at their line: five homers, double, lots of damage. Look at yesterday, damage. Day before: Damage. They outslugged us.”
9. The inning that ended Gibson’s evening and got uglier from there brought nine Reds to the plate when it could have been as few as four and definitely no more than six.
A pair of solo home runs against Gibson upped the Reds’ lead to 5-0 – a gulch for a team struggling to score like the Cardinals but an inconvenience for a team ready to take advantage of Great American Ball Park’s welcoming dimensions. The last batter Gibson faced lined a single to left field that kicked off Tommy Pham’s glove for an error and a runner at second.
With two outs, reliever John King entered the game and got all of the groundballs he wanted and none of the plays to turn them into the third out.
Brendan Donovan committed an error on a groundball. Paul Goldschmidt said he “should have picked that ball (from Donovan’s throw), and that inning would be over.” Masyn Winn had a grounder go off his glove on a tough play that he didn’t get a chance to make as a result. The errors only led to one run, but the inning had the unspooling feel of a team that had just been stunned by another deep deficit and was pushing to make the play to get back out of the latest crevice.
“That inning didn’t make the game,” Pham said.
It seemed to at least capture a moment.
8. The Cardinals had their chances in multiple innings to either get ahead of the Reds’ early or chomp into the lead late, and all of that stalled with eight at-bats with runners in scoring position that did not produce a hit or run.
Two double plays in the first two innings allowed Reds’ opener Emilio Pagan to complete two innings and setup the preferred matchup for lefty Sam Moll in the third inning. In the fifth, Donovan led off with a double.
Four batters and three outs later he had not budged from second.
Immediately after the fraught fifth inning, the Reds gave the Cardinals a chance to reduce the gap on the scoreboard. The first four Cardinals of the inning had base hits. Two of them had RBIs, and the back half of the lineup would get a chance with two runners on base. Donovan and Goldschmidt both struck out to tilt the inning back to the Reds.
“We tried to come back, tried to get some runners on we weren’t able to get that momentum going, and they did,” Goldschmidt said. “We’re fighting to come back when you’re in it, and you strike out with guys on like I did there. Obviously frustrating in the moment. You can’t let that carry over.”
The Cardinals finished 4 for 20 in the series with runners in scoring position.
All four of those hits were singles; one did not score a run.
7. The Cardinals struck out seven times, including twice in the sixth with runners in scoring position, while facing a parade of relievers from the Reds to cover innings. Cincinnati had a classic bullpen game, and six different pitchers kept the Cardinals to two runs. Five of them kept the Cardinals scoreless in their innings.
In the series, Cardinals hitters had more strikeouts (27) than hits (19).
6. No. 6 on his jersey and No. 1 in Cincinnati’s lineup, India entered Wednesday’s game in a 0 for 22 spiral that dipped down to 0 for 23 with his leadoff flyout in the first inning. That dropped the former National League Rookie of the Year into a 1 for 29 stretch that would be familiar to some of the Cardinals who have not “felt right” about their swing for the past several weeks or months. All India needed to snap out of it was a home run-friendly day at the ballpark and a couple of pitches he could drive from Gibson (7-5).
India’s homer in the third and homer in the fifth gave him in the fourth multi-homer game of his career. Tyler Stephenson and Friedl also homered off Gibson.
“Bad time to throw really bad pitches,” Gibson said. “And they put good swings on them. That’s what they’re supposed to do.”
5. The Reds woke up Sunday morning alone in fifth place in the five-team NL Central. The Brewers lost a couple of games to the Dodgers, and the Reds kept the Cardinals from taking advantage and closing the gap on Milwaukee. Pittsburgh is foundering, the Cubs are Cubs, and in a clear sign of how congested the division is – and perhaps how volatile it still could be – the Reds leapfrogged from fifth on Sunday to a tie for second by Wednesday.
4. The Cardinals doubled their total offense in the series to four runs with two in Wednesday’s loss. The four runs scored by the Cardinals total in the series were the same as the fewest the Reds scored in any single game. Reds outfielder Spencer Steer had five RBIs in Monday’s game. He had only two hits the rest of the series and yet produced more runs on two swings than the Cardinals did in their 27 innings.
“They outslugged us,” Marmol said. “That’s where the game was.”
That’s how the series went.
3. Nolan Arenado drove in three of the Cardinals’ runs in the series. He hit the only home run with a ferocious swing in Tuesday’s game that momentarily jolted the Cardinals. Arenado also had RBI singles in the bookend games, and during the rising potential of Wednesday’s sixth inning, Arenado threaded a hard groundball past the reach of Elly De La Cruz for an RBI.
The only other swing in the entire series that produced a run by a Cardinal hitter came two batters earlier Wednesday in the sixth inning when Alec Burleson lined an RBI single for the Cardinals’ first run.
Cardinals not named Arenado had 86 at-bats and one RBI hit.
2. What helped make Wednesday’s bullpen start possible and not turbulent was two quality starts by the Reds’ starters in the first two games. Lefty Andrew Abbott continued the troubles the Cardinals have had against southpaws this season by holding them to one run through 6 2/3 innings. That left seven outs for one reliever to get without dipping into or stretching the bullpen ahead of Wednesday’s game.
On Tuesday, Reds rising ace Hunter Greene struck out eight and held the Cardinals to Arenado’s solo homer in seven innings. That left two innings for the bullpen to cover on the eve of having to throw all nine. The Reds’ starters covered enough innings for the bullpen not to be thinned or unstable or vulnerable going into a game the bullpen had to cover the whole evening.
The Cardinals, meanwhile, did not have one quality start.
1. Back from Class AAA Memphis and riding a solid streak of powerful production there, Jordan Walker started one game in the series in Cincinnati. Marmol explained that Walker will be used in a “platoon” role and targeted against lefties, whether that’s in the starting lineup or coming off the bench. On Wednesday, Walker was part of what the Cardinals saw as a matchup trap they wanted to set for one of the Reds’ two lefty relievers. They sprang it in that defining sixth inning and Walker popped out.
He finished the game in right field with a single, and he also had a walk earlier in the series when he started Monday’s game against a lefty.
0. While the home runs (10) and the quality starts (2) illustrated how the Reds swept the series, how much they overwhelmed the Cardinals and never flinched the series is best described by the number zero.
That is the number of appearances, combined, by the three relievers who make up the strength of the Cardinals and the reason they’ve thrived in so many close games. Andrew Kittredge, JoJo Romero, and All-Star closer Ryan Hensley combined for zero appearances, zero innings, and zero pitches thrown in the three-day visit to Cincinnati.
Zero.
