“Mayday, Mayday!”: Reds Swept by Pirates
by William Meiners
It’s maybe my favorite flip of the calendar. With the final half-hearted, one-third auto-generated papers to grade, the spring semester comes to a bittersweet end. Mostly bitter. And in spite of the warnings from Michigan weathermen to encourage DIY gardeners to treat their tulips like a hooded and bound Patty Hearst, early May is sweet relief for me.
Perhaps my Reds never saw it coming. With one of their better Aprils in history, the Cincinnati kids sat atop the NL Central with 20 wins, 11 losses. They won a dozen games by one or two runs — their losses mostly lopsided affairs. An improvement over the 2025 season where they lost lots of close games. In 2025, their bats went silent on April Fool’s Day in the first of three consecutive 1-0 shutouts.
Those old baseball bugaboos — frequent swings and misses, a few guys not hitting even their Little League weight — haven’t hurt the Reds too much. Heck, they were nearly 10 games north of .500 with good pitching overall, especially from the bullpen. And they showed spunk, winning games late. Bring on May and those bloodthirsty Pirates. And lo and behold the Friday night opener is on Apple TV on the first of May.
There’s not much made of May Day protests in our little town. I put off some scheduled banking and refrained from forking out anything to billionaires. The cold, winterish May pounced in like a lion throwing up bloody furballs on the carpet. And we’ve got a dog capable of that. To bear the spring cold, I built an indoor fire. Joellen, my wife, suggested an outdoor blaze and a dip in the hot tub under the evening’s full moon. She may have been dipping into her own witch’s handbook, and I half suspected naked wind sprints through the yard. All fine save for my shin splints and a disdain for running.
The Pirates made it a laugher early, touching up Reds starter Brady Singer. I opted in on the hot tub, just as the clouds hid the moon. The Bucks led 9-1 before I dried off. Saturday was even more laughable. Staked to a two-run lead before taking the mound, longhaired righthander Rhett Lowder gave up five runs in the first inning.
Lowder and reliever Connor Phillips reverted to the stuff of Little League nightmares in the second, walking seven straight batters. The Pirates scored five more runs without hitting a ball out of the infield. Oneil Cruz — good stick, makes spikes look like ice skates in centerfield sometimes — made the first and third outs of that inning (a big fear of mine in the 1970s). They added five more in the fifth to secure the humiliation. For the third time in a week, backup catcher Jose Trevino, whose “fastball” would scarcely raise a crossing guard’s eyebrow, pitched in a mop-up role. Third time! One week!
A 17-7 loss tallies the same as the one-run shortcomings from last year. On Sunday, with his club looking to salvage one win in the first Steel City trip, rookie Chase Burns did his part by pitching seven shutout innings. A couple of walks, however, from Tony Santillan, an eighth-inning strongman, set up their Cruz (not our Elly) for a two-out, game-winning single. The Reds first close loss.
Cincinnati dropped to third in the fast-starting Central, where even the basement Pirates climbed three games over even. With no rest for the shellshocked, the Reds head to Chicago to face the streaking Cubs on Monday night. I’d light a candle if I thought Jesus loved me. Maybe Joellen can explain her “Star Wars” religion to me. Anything to make the “fourth be with” the Reds in a four-game series at Wrigley.
William Meiners is the editor of Sport Literate. Among his summer 2026 plans are the documentation of 33 Reds’ series. That should be about 600 to 700 words every few days. If you don’t expect too much breakdown or analysis, outside of his own troubled head, you may not be disappointed. From losing streaks through high-water marks, he’ll follow the club, sometimes literally, from the reluctant spring of early May through the dog days of August. Then he’s off to something else.