It’s becoming too common of a refrain that Reds ace Johnny Cueto is unlucky after pitching great games and not being rewarded. It’s been even more redundant that the Reds aren’t winning the close games, regardless of who is on the mound.
Cueto pitched eight scoreless innings of three-hit baseball and came up empty in a 1-0 Reds loss to the Braves in 10 innings on Sunday at Turner Field. Freddie Freeman provided a walk-off single in the bottom of the 10th to give Atlanta the three-game series sweep.
Cincinnati, at 11-14 overall, is 3-9 in one-run games this season.
“That’s part of the game,” Cueto said via translator Tomas Vera about his misfortune. “I would have liked to win. I did a good job.”
Cueto has a 1.15 ERA, but only a 2-2 record, through six starts this season. Coming off of back-to-back complete games before Sunday, he has allowed one earned run over his last 30 innings and has 27 strikeouts over his last three starts.
“It was a great month,” Cueto said. “All I have to do, I hope, is to stay healthy and continue working.”
The Reds are 2-4 in the games that Cueto has started. In two of the losses they were shut out, and in a third they scored only one run.
“It was definitely tough for Johnny because he hasn’t had a bad game,” Reds manager Bryan Price said. “He’s pitched a great game. It was tough for us. It was another one-run game that we weren’t able to pull out. You want to win the games that are there.”
Price spent nine of the 10 innings watching the game from his office after he was ejected for arguing after a replay challenge didn’t go the Reds’ way in the bottom of the first inning. Price disputed that B.J. Upton was safe at first base after a Cueto pickoff throw. Pitcher Homer Bailey was also ejected for yelling from the bench.
“There’s no real debate about if they got it right or if they got it wrong,” Price said. “In the end, you have the biggest Jumbotron in the country out there in center field that would strongly suggest that the runner was out on the pickoff. Then to say he’s not, it seems to contradict what everyone in the ballpark thought was an out. I didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me.”
After back-to-back losses to begin the series, Cueto gave the stopper performance the Reds needed with 11 strikeouts and three walks over his eight innings. But it was matched evenly during a splendid duel against the Braves’ Julio Teheran.
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