After getting only three hits Friday against the Tampa Bay Rays and winning in 10 innings, the Reds tried to win Saturday with four hits.
This time they didn’t score, a four-hit 4-0 loss to the Rays when it looked as if they were taking No. 2 pencils with them to the plate instead of Louisville Sluggers.
On Friday, the Reds scored two runs in the first and didn’t score again until the 10th inning on Stuart Fairchild’s double, their third hit, but enough for a 3-2 win.
So the Reds have gone their last 18 innings with one run and the shutout was the sixth time they’ve been blanked.
All four hits were harmless singles, one was an infield hit, and two came back-to-back with two outs in the fourth — Spencer Steer and TJ Friedl. But Jeimer Candelario lined to second.
After that, it was lethargy. Will Benson’s one-out single in the eighth was Cincinnati’s only hit from the fourth through the ninth.
Tampa Bay starter Zack Little came in with a 3-7 record and a 4.46 earned run average. In his last start, the struggling New York Yankees ravaged him for five runs and nine hits in 5 2/3 innings. And three starts ago, Texas ripped him for seven runs and nine hits in four innings.
The Rays picked up the much-traveled 28-year-old right-hander off the waiver wire from Boston after he moved from Seattle to the New York Yankees to Texas to Minnesota to San Francisco to Boston.
At most of those stops he was a relief pitcher, but Tampa Bay converted him into a starter and to the Reds he looked like Greg Maddux, a soft-thrower who picks on the edges of the strike zone and induces soft contact.
He pitched seven innings and gave up three hits and one walk while striking out five. Kevin Kelly and Colin Poche completed the shutout with an inning apiece.
Cincinnati starter Andrew Abbott (9-6) gave up a run in the second, but it was only 1-0 when he began the fifth. It looked like another game of stranded runners for the Rays. They were 1 for 9 with runners in scoring position and stranded 10 Friday night.
When the fifth inning began Saturday, they were 0 for 5 with four stranded runners against Abbott.
There was a glaring clue that the fifth inning was going to be a magnitude seven earthquake hit Abbott.
The first batter was catcher and No. 9 hitter Alex Jackson. He was hitting .101, the lowest average of any player in MLB with more than 100 plate appearances.
Abbott fed him a 0-and-1 82 mph sweeper and Jackson swept it 407 feet over the left field wall to make it 2-0.
Perhaps in seismic shock, Abbott threw the next hitter, Yandy Diaz, an 0-and-2 93 mph four-seamer and Diaz hit a 384-foot screamer over the right-center wall.
And the Rays weren’t done. The next two batters, Amed Rosario and Brandon Lowe, hit back-to-back doubles for another run to make it 4-0.
That was four straight extra base hits to start the inning and Abbott was finished — four-plus innings, four runs, eight hits, two walks and two strikeouts, his shortest outing of the season.
Losing the second game of a series is a common work sheet for the Reds. After winning Friday, their record in the first game of a series is 23-11, best record in MLB.
It’s the second and third games of series that plague them with frustrating losses.
There is a familiarity to many Reds losses. It is self-evident that when Jonathan India and Elly De La Cruz produce as the team’s first and second hitters, the Reds win.
Over the first two games of this series, the two are 0 for 14 with five strikeouts and two walks. India walked to open Friday’s game and scored one of the team’s three runs.
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