Raise you hand if you’ve ever witnessed each team score eight runs in the same inning.
Put your hand down.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen a team come from eight runs behind in the eighth inning to tie the game.
Put your hand down.
But that is all true, it all happened.
With the weather cooled down, both the Braves and the Reds built snowmen in the eighth inning, ‘8’ runs on each side.
The Braves broke a 3-3 tie in the top of the eighth against Graham Ashcraft, Sam Moll and Lyon Richardson with their eight runs to take an 11-3 lead, causing many in the crowd of 27,169 to vacate to beat the traffic.
The first four Braves reached base on hits. The second hit was an infield hit and the third was a bunt that rolled foul then kicked back fair.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“That bunt was going foul and it hit something in the dirt and bounced (fair) into the grass,” First baseman Spencer Steer told reporters after the game. “It was a weird one.”
Five more hits and a walk followed and it was 11-3 and the Reds seemed down and out.
Amazingly, the first eight Reds registered hits. The Braves didn’t hit a home run in their eighth, but the Reds produced two.
Tyler Stephenson and Will Benson singled. That brought up the newest Reds player, third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes.
Trumpeted as the best thing defensively at third base since Brooks Robinson, Hayes flubbed two plays early in the game, one a two-run error that enabled the Braves to come from 3-0 down to tie the game.
He made up for it ... and then some. A three-run home run and it was 11-6. Finished? Just getting started.
Matt McLain, batting leadoff during TJ Friedl’s paternity leave absence, was 0 for 10 when the game began. But he singled in the eighth, his third straight hit.
Noelvi Marte, moved up to second in the batting order, singled. Elly De La Cruz singled and it was 11-7. Austin Hayes singled and it was 11-8.
That brough up Steer, the man who tripled home the two winning runs in Wednesday’s 5-2 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
This time he ripped a three-run home run into the left field seats to tie it, 11-11, and he screamed all the way around the bases.
Eight straight hits, eight runs ... and still nobody out.
Stephenson walked with one out, but Benson grounded to the pitcher and Hayes flied to right.
After each team scored eight in the eighth, both went down 1-2-3 in the ninth. When Reds pitcher Brent Suter finished his 1-2-3, he danced and yelled all the way to the dugout.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
What the two teams did was done for only the third time in MLB history — both teams scoring eight or more runs in the same inning.
The Braves scored a run in the top of the 10th without a hit off Emilio Pagan. Ghost runner Matt Olson moved from second to third on a fly ball and scored on Marcell Ozuna’s sacrifice fly.
Former Reds pitcher Raisel Iglesias took the mound for the 10th. Elly De La Cruz was Cincinnati’s ghost runner and he was entrapped in a rundown on Austin Hays’ grounder to short. Hays reached second while De La Cruz was tagged out.
This time Steer struck out and Gavin Lux, 2 for 32 as pinch-hitter for his career, popped out to end one of baseball’s all-time extraordinary games.
“It hurts,” said Steer. “Yeah, we fell short. It’s just a loss. That one stings. It was just one of those weird games. The ball was doing weird stuff, finding holes and outs were hard to come by.
“But that’s a lot of fight from this team, man, being able to scratch eight across like that,” he added. “Both teams with an eight-spot, I ain’t never seen anything like that.”
Neither has anybody else.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
“Not that they had to show me, I already felt that way, but that’s a heck of a lot better than pitching (position player) Jose Trevino,” said Reds manager Tito Francona. “That’s a hard game to win, but keep playing, keep playing.
“After the bunt, which was unfortunate because I don’t know what he (Steer) could have done,” he added. “After that we just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”
The Reds led, 3-0, after three against 38-year-old right-hander Carlos Carrasco, pitching his first game since May. With two outs and nobody on in the second, Jake Fraley walked and Stephenson doubled him home.
With two outs and nobody on in the third, Marte beat an infield single to shortstop and De La Cruz ended a 30-game homerless spell with a homer over the center field wall.
The Braves scored a run off Reds starter Nick Lodolo in the fourth and tied it in the sixth on Hayes’ error.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Lodolo was not at his best, struggling throughout while giving up three runs, five hits and tied a career high with five walks in his six innings.
Extra innings have not been productive for the Reds, now 3-and-6 in extra innings. The Braves had lost 26 one-run games, but are now 14-26 and 7-6 in extra innings.
Those aren’t your father’s Atlanta Braves wearing Braves uniforms these days — No Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Chipper Jones or Andruw Jones.
Their entire starting rotation is on the injured list. They arrived in Cincinnati’s with seven losses in their previous eight games and losses in nine of 11.
On Wednesday, they lost a 1-0 10-inning game to the Kansas City Royals and own 62 losses this season.
The Reds, though, helped make them look more like the 1990s Braves.
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