Let’s recap tonight’s titanic struggle….
FINAL – 11 innings
Cincinnati 0
Philadelphia 1
WP: Contreras (4-3)
LP: Bray (0-1)
BOX SCORE
POSITIVES
–Travis Wood, making his third major league start, took a perfect game into the ninth inning. He gave up a hit, but still finished up with a nine inning outing, giving up no runs on one hit, striking out 8 and walking none. It was as dominating a performance as you are likely to see…and he couldn’t even get a win out of it. What an unfair world.
NEGATIVES
–The stupid offense couldn’t get a single run to back up Wood’s brilliant performance. So sad. Sure, they were facing Roy Halladay, but it still stinks.
NOT-SO-RANDOM THOUGHTS
–Travis Wood reminded me of Mike Leake today. Just completely in control the entire game. He looked like a veteran.
Yes, it makes me excited to think that we’re talking about two rookie pitchers here.
–Let me just talk everyone down from the ledge. The Reds have lost three straight games; this is true. They were three extra-inning games, coin-flips basically. Any of them could have gone the other way. Only one of them was a bad loss (yesterday’s debacle), but if one extra hit falls in each of these games, the Reds are going for the sweep.
As I said in the game thread, yeah, the bullpen got rocked yesterday and they blew one. But they had a great hitting game and excellent starting pitching yesterday. The day before, they lost in 12 innings. Today, they had great starting pitching again, and the bullpen did fine. The offense couldn’t hit, but they were facing Roy Halladay.
Before losing those three coin flips, they had won TWELVE of their last sixteen games!
I love being pessimistic, and after the last decade of following the Reds, I don’t blame anyone for starting to believe that this is the beginning of the end. As Reds fans, we’ve earned the right to see the glass as half-empty; no question about it.
This Reds team has been coming back from stuff like this all season long, though. I’m going to just take a deep breath and try to be optimistic.
–I wish I had a Travis Wood sombrero picture. If ever a player deserved a sombrero after a loss, it’s Travis Wood tonight. Kudos, young man!