Reds miss opportunity for road relief in seesaw finale with Padres

SAN DIEGO -- It's not just a hard flight back to Cincinnati because the Reds won only one of six games on their road trip through St. Louis and San Diego. It's knowing that they led all six games and couldn't close most of them out with more wins.

Much of that burden falls on the bullpen, as it did again during Wednesday afternoon's 5-4 walk-off loss to the Padres at Petco Park that sent the Reds to a fourth straight series defeat. It ended when Fernando Tatis Jr. hit only his second home run of the season and his first at home. That's just how things are going right now.

“It’s tough, but it’s baseball," said starting pitcher Brady Singer, who pitched six innings and departed with a 3-2 lead. "These guys are working every single day. They’re competing and that’s the only thing we can do -- go out and compete. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it doesn’t.”

The Reds (32-35), who have dropped 10 of their last 13 games, got 5 2/3 innings of solid relief with one unearned run to be a major key behind Tuesday's 5-3 win in 11 innings. That meant the group was somewhat depleted heading into Wednesday.

Chase Petty, a starter for Triple-A Louisville, typically doesn't work in relief, but he wasn't immune to the big-league bullpen's blues of late. After flying to town late Tuesday and being recalled on Wednesday, Petty was on the mound for the ninth inning and recorded two outs before Tatis drove his 2-1 slider into the first couple of rows of left-field seats.

“Actually, I didn’t think he made a real bad pitch," manager Terry Francona said. "When the ball was hit, I was kind of looking at my lineup card like, ‘OK, we’re going to have an open base, what do we want to do?’ I didn’t think that ball was going to get out.”

Three home runs powered the Reds’ offense. They were trailing, 1-0, in the fourth inning, when Spencer Steer hit Michael King's 2-1 sinker to left field for a two-run homer, his 10th of the season, for the first lead.

Against King in the top of the seventh, JJ Bleday hit a 1-0 changeup to right field for his 11th homer and a 3-2 advantage. Eugenio Suárez provided an insurance run in the eighth inning with his homer to left field.

After Zach Maxwell provided a scoreless seventh inning of relief, lefty Caleb Ferguson opened the eighth with Jackson Merrill scorching a double to left field and scoring on Gavin Sheets' double to right field for the first run Ferguson allowed after six scoreless outings since debuting on May 27.

Tony Santillan took over and, with two outs, surrendered Samad Taylor's game-tying RBI single to center field.

“Nobody is running from it. You can’t run from it," Ferguson said. "We’re going to look up at this thing and we’re going to be better off as a team by the time we get to the other side of this and we’re still right there. We’re not out of it. It’s just a matter of keep stacking the good days together and figuring out how to win a game.”

A group that's been burned by walks most of the season, Reds relievers did not issue an unintentional walk in any of the three games vs. the Padres. Francona noted that each of them wanted the ball and weren't backing down from the challenge.

“I've got a guy like Tony Santillan that’s pitched three out of four [games] and he’s in here wanting to fight me so he can pitch today. That shows me guys care," Francona said.

"The results are not what we want. There’s no getting around that. I’m not going to sit here and say a month ago, ‘I love these guys,’ and now we’ve lost some games that I hate them, because that’s not how I feel. We’re going to struggle and we’re going to struggle together. We’re going to figure it out together.”

Cincinnati's bullpen ranks 29th out of 30 clubs with a 5.13 ERA, largely due to the struggles it has experienced the past six weeks. On April 28, the group had the best ERA in baseball (2.83).

“Just got to keep making pitches," Ferguson said. "It takes a really long year to have a bad year and it takes a really long year to have a good year. You’re allowed to have skids in this game and they’re going to happen. You just got to get out of them. The beauty of it is, I think we’re really, really close. In a lot of these games, we’re two-to-three pitches from winning all these games.”