Since falling a season-worst six games under .500 on May 29, the Cincinnati Reds have posted a 19-12 record to stay afloat in the National League Central.
The tough part is that they’ve dropped one game in the standings during that span because the first-place Milwaukee Brewers have been the NL’s best team for the past month. The Brewers entered Saturday on a 10-game winning streak, the club’s longest since 2003.
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The Reds hit the midway point in their season after Friday’s 2-1 win against the Chicago Cubs in front of a sold-out crowd of 40,854. The Reds have a 41-40 record and sit 6.5 games out of a playoff spot.
“That’s not good enough,” Joey Votto said. “Not good enough. We’ve got about a month to really show, I know we’ve got three (months), but it’s really important over this next bit to show that we’re going to be a competitive team all the way to the very end. We have to get hot soon. We have to play good ball, for sure.”
It’s the first time the Reds have a winning record at the halfway point of the season since 2014 (43-38 record). They had no more than 38 wins midway through the season from 2015-19.
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The next two weeks could be a determining factor in their trade deadline plans with two more games against the Cubs and then seven straight games against the Brewers (four before the All-Star break, three afterward).
“We’ve got to stay on pace,” Reds reliever Brad Brach said of the Brewers. “They’re hot, we got to stay with them. Just stay close. They’re not going to go 10-0 all season. Just got to win games whenever we get an opportunity and we know we’ve got seven coming up against them here. It’s definitely an important stretch for us.
“We’re playing really good baseball right now. We’ve had a lot of tight games here lately. It’s been a lot of fun out there. Just hopeful we can pull out some of these close games and just keep pace with them. That’s really all you can do right now.”
Even when the Reds lost six of their seven games against the San Diego Padres last month, Reds players felt like they played them well. Seven of the team’s last eight losses have been decided by two or fewer runs.
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The Reds entered Saturday with a 20-12 record against divisional opponents.
“It might sound funny being the manager,” David Bell said, “but I love watching our team play.”
The Reds should receive some reinforcements over the next couple of weeks to their bullpen. Michael Lorenzen and Jeff Hoffman are on rehab assignments. Tejay Antone hopes to return shortly after the All-Star break. Sonny Gray rejoined the rotation Friday and allowed one run in five innings.
“I feel like we’ve just been picking up momentum in the way we’ve played,” Bell said. “We’ve been playing some good teams, so we haven’t had maybe as many wins as we could have given how we played, but I do think that will continue to pay off. I like how we’re playing going into this stretch.”
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Said Nick Castellanos: “Even though we dropped the series against the Padres, we didn’t play bad baseball. All the games that we have now are important, really. If we’re going to achieve our goal and be playing baseball in October, there needs to be a lot of wins moving forward.”
Reds starting pitchers had a collective 3.59 ERA in June, which ranked seventh in the Majors. The offense had the NL’s best on-base percentage (.339) and scored the second-most runs (137) behind only the Brewers.
The bullpen had its notable struggles but entered Saturday with a 1.46 ERA in the club’s last eight games.
“Maybe we’ve turned the corner here and can kind of get on a roll,” Brach said of the bullpen. “Sometimes, it can just be one outing here or there but everyone is doing their part whenever they’re out there, throwing strikes, getting ahead of guys and just putting up zeros. That’s really all we can do right now.”
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