Reds light up Lackey, pen
CINCINNATI — A longtime rival baseball scout earlier this week started rattling off the merits of the 2016 Cubs, from their leftright balance, speed-power balance, starting pitching and so on.
So, he was asked, barring injury, what can stop them from doing what they expect to do this year?
“Well,” he said, “they’ve got to play the games.” Case in point: Game No. 18. Just when it looked as if the Cubs had so thoroughly overpowered the Reds in Cincinnati this week that their fans had moved in to colonize the stadium, the beleaguered Reds rose up with four home runs in two innings Saturday night to rout the top-trending team in baseball 13-5.
Just like that, right-hander John Lackey lost his bid for a 4-0 start, the Cubs no longer had the best record in baseball, and everyone was reminded again that winning big-league games is never as easy as the hottest teams sometimes make it look.
“It’s the big leagues, man,” Lackey (3-1) said. “There’s professionals over there that get paid, too.”
And this on a day Lackey’s velocity was in the mid-90s, and “nothing wrong with the stuff,” he said.
He retired the first nine batters he faced and, if anything, he might have benefitted from going outside the strike zone at times, especially inside, especially with two strikes.
“Sometimes you can almost throw too many strikes. Maybe you make some people a little more uncomfortable,” said Lackey, who had two-strike counts before four of the seven hits he allowed — including the two leading off the fourth that led to the first two runs against him.
“There’s ways to rectify that,” he said.
In the bigger picture, a team that had matched its best 17-game start in 109 years and its best 11-game road start (9-2) ever isn’t sweating No. 18 of 162.
“Crazy game. They got us tonight,” manager Joe Maddon said.
The Cubs led 3-2 before the Reds unloaded on Lackey and reliever Trevor Cahill for seven runs in the sixth, including a three-run homer by Eugenio Suarez off Lackey and another one by Adam Duvall off Cahill. Then Scott Schebler made it back-to-back homers off Cahill.
Joey Votto added a two-run homer off Neil Ramirez in the seventh.
Until the Reds scored their first run of the game in the fourth in- ning, the Cubs had a plus-40 run differential against the Reds alone this year, in just five-plus games.
But it’s not as if you’re going to win 13 out of every 17.
“It’s not easy to do,” Maddon said, then adding with a smile, “but we thought we could.”
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