Reds erase deficit, doubts
Bats awaken after Pirates rock Williams
BY JOHN FAY | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER
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PITTSBURGH - About the time the ball Jason Bay hit set sail for the left-field seats, you probably figured the Reds were done for the day. You had to wonder if this was the beginning of the end for 2006.
A loss would have been the Reds' sixth in a row. The Pirates would have swept the series.
We say "would have" because the Reds, a team that had scored 10 runs in its previous five games, came back to score nine times in eight innings Thursday and beat the Pirates 9-8 at PNC Park.
Big win, eh?
"Absolutely," reliever Todd Coffey said. "It was definitely a big game to win. You don't want to go too high or too low."
Coffey could have added that a loss would have put the Reds at their low point of the year.
The Reds are, after all, a team most experts picked to finish fifth or sixth in the National League Central.
And a sweep by Pittsburgh, the NL Central's sixth-place team, would have had fans wondering if the Reds were leveling off.
It's foolhardy to make too much of any one game in the course of a 162-game season. But you have to credit the Reds for the way they won Thursday.
Bay's grand slam was the big blow of the six-run first the Pirates hung on ex-teammate Dave Williams.
Down 6-0 on a get-away day?
Fire up the bus.
The reeling Reds seemed bound for Detroit on a horrible skid.
But they kept coming back. And back. And back.
"It shows a little bit of the character of this team, not giving up," Ken Griffey Jr. said. "We came up with a tough one, and a long one."
It takes awhile to come back from a 6-0 deficit.
The Reds hadn't been down 6-0 and won since July 13, 2003, when they trailed Milwaukee 7-1 and ended up winning 10-8 in 12 innings.
Jason LaRue hit a two-run home run in the second inning to get things started. The Reds added another run in the fourth and two more in the fifth, including one off a home run by Austin Kearns.
"There was no panic from the players," said LaRue, who had a career-high four hits. "You've just got to go out and play station-to-station baseball, do the little things."
The Reds took control of the game in the seventh.
The inning started with doubles by Scott Hatteberg and Edwin Encarnacion. Ryan Freel singled in Encarnacion to tie it at 7-7.
Pinch hitter Javier Valentin and Felipe Lopez walked to load the bases.
But Adam Dunn struck out on three pitches for the second out, and you could feel the bad karma that has followed the Reds on the losing streak.
Then Griffey dropped a single into left and drove in two runs - the 1,549th and 1,550th RBI of his career.
"I was just trying not to strike out," Griffey said. "(Pirates left-handed reliever Damaso Marte's) tough on lefties. He's throwing 94 (mph). He got it in there a little bit. But I was able to get it far enough to the outfield and near enough to the infield to fall."
Was that the hit that turns things around? We'll see.
The Reds never figured out what started the funk that led to the five-game losing streak.
"That's baseball," LaRue said. "People catch on to slumps. You get cold at the same time. The easiest way to explain it is baseball's a game of ups and downs, and there for five games, the offense didn't do too much."
Narron thinks in some odd way the 6-0 deficit might have gotten the offense going.
"I don't know," he said. "We got down so much early in the game that it might have given everybody a chance to relax a little bit."
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