ST. LOUIS -- An impenetrably muggy night at Busch Stadium kept the bats mostly at bay for both teams through Saturday night’s first five innings, with the only dent in either starter's line coming on an unearned run notched against Hunter Greene in the first.
All things were shaping up as another impressive step forward in Greene’s injury-truncated season, but a Cardinals offense that has been one of the worst in baseball for the last month came to life in the sixth. As Greene’s pitch count mounted, so too did the St. Louis hit total, and the young fireballer came away with an ugly line in a 7-0 loss in the second game of the three-game set.
In all, Greene allowed seven runs (six earned) in 5 1/3 innings pitched, surrendering eight hits and two walks while striking out just three. It marked just the second time in Greene’s career that he pitched that deep into a game while striking out so few opponents, having also struck out three in six innings in Houston on June 17, 2023.
“Frustrated, just because I was in control early and let it slip,” assessed Greene of his evening. “Not much of an explanation for that. There were some pitches that got away from me early on that I was trying to get back to, so I knew that if I wasn’t executing that later on in the game, they’d probably come back and get me later on, and they did.”
The concerns were around locations of his slider, which both Greene and manager Terry Francona acknowledged were often in elevated locations, inviting dangerous contact. The two-run double driven into the left-field corner by Iván Herrera in the sixth came on a thigh-high backup slider, and Blaze Jordan was able to fight off two elevated sliders for foul balls before punching a Baltimore Chop over the first-base bag against a sinker which scored two and chased Greene from the game.
“The [sixth] inning was getting going, and I still thought his stuff was OK,” said Francona. “I really wanted to get through Jordan with him, and when Jordan kind of hit that excuse-me base hit, that kind of crushed me a little bit.”
Complicating matters was a quiet night from the Cincinnati offense. Elly De La Cruz singled in the third, JJ Bleday singled in the fourth, and Sal Stewart singled in the ninth, representing the only three Reds hits of the night. Bleday also drew the only Cincinnati walk against Cardinals starter Andre Pallante, who turned in a dominant seven-inning performance.
De La Cruz walked leading off the ninth, and in the process, became the first Cincinnati hitter to reach base since that fourth-inning Bleday single. Stewart was next up, and his single broke the hitting drought too late to make a difference.
“His breaking ball is what kind of gave us fits,” Francona said of Pallante. “He’s got some deception in his delivery, and out of that, the breaking ball really gave us a tough time.”
With the Cardinals struggling to put up offense from the depths of their lineup for the better part of the last month, Greene spent the first five innings of his start mostly deftly pitching around its more dangerous spots. Indeed, none of the bottom six hitters in the St. Louis order reached base until Greene surrendered the double to Herrera, which started the trouble in the sixth.
By the time Greene yielded the ball to Sam Moll, the last six hitters he faced had reached base, with five recording hits and Lars Nootbaar mixing in a walk. Jordan’s bounding base hit officially terminated what up to that inning could reasonably have been called a pitchers’ duel.
As the Reds scratch and claw to regain ground in the National League Wild Card standings and attempt to stave off the departure of important players at the approaching Trade Deadline, there’s a natural friction between the necessity of competing in the short term and the long-term importance of Greene’s growth and prominence in the rotation. There were plenty of positives to be found in the first five innings of his fourth start of 2026, but translating those positives into results feels a bit like a March task that can’t solve a July problem.
Greene is still pitching into form. He also has to be in form right now for it to matter this season.
“Don’t have grace like that here, where I can be like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m trying to get in the groove,’” Greene acknowledged. “That sure … can’t be my mentality, and the execution can’t be like that either. Every game matters. Every pitch matters. So there’s a reality in that, but I can’t embody that.”