The ball hung in left-center long enough for every Reds fan to start exhaling. Two outs in the ninth. Lead intact. JJ Wetherholt’s fly ball was the kind of play that ends afternoon games and sends a clubhouse into the next series with a quiet win in hand. Dane Myers ranged over, called off TJ Friedl, and watched it glance off his glove. Two runs scored. Then four more. Cardinals 10, Reds 9. That sequence is not a highlight-reel oops. It is a master class in how one misread of the leather turns a managed ninth into a 76-pitch disaster.
I keep coming back to the pre-pitch conversation, not the drop itself. Myers was shaded toward left. The Reds had already decided the gap belonged to him. Friedl, the defensive replacement, was fighting the sun with his sunglasses still on his hat. Myers owned the responsibility and took it.
“Shaded over a good bit. We had talked before the play. Anything in that gap with how we were shaded was supposed to be mine,” Myers said. “So, I know the sun may have been tough. Pretty loud for the last out of a game. I called him off and just didn’t make the play.”
Terry Francona saw the same thing from the dugout. “TJ looked like he was fighting the sun and I was kind of glad that Myers called him off,” Francona said. “Just didn’t look it into his glove. Just glanced off.”
The call was correct. The catch was not. That distinction matters more than the viral clip.
The Error Was Earned. The Six Runs Were Not.
Official scoring listed it as Myers’ first error after 82 clean outfield games this season. Fair. The baseball glanced. What followed was pure process failure. Brock Burke and Zach Maxwell combined to let the Cardinals plate six unearned runs in the top of the ninth. Walks, a hit batter, free bases with the game already flipped. The frame produced 10 combined runs, five hits, eight walks, and 76 pitches from four arms. That is not bad luck. That is a bullpen that lost the strike zone the second the lead evaporated.
I ran the inning back against every late-lead collapse pattern I track. Once the tying and go-ahead runs cross on an error, the next three batters almost always face elevated chase rates and expanded zones. Burke never recovered the edge. Maxwell inherited chaos and poured gasoline on it. The Cardinals did not hit their way to a 10-5 lead. They walked into it after the defense handed them first and second life.
Matt McLain’s earlier grand slam in the sixth had given Cincinnati the 5-4 edge. Jordan Walker’s three-run shot and four RBI day for St. Louis set the tone. None of that survived the ninth. Eugenio Suárez notched his 1,000th career RBI in the Reds’ four-run bottom half. Sal Stewart drove in two more and reclaimed the MLB RBI lead. Bases loaded, McLain smoked a 102 mph liner to right for the final out. The Reds nearly stole the game back. Nearly is the word that hangs over every clubhouse in August.
Wild-Card Math Does Not Forgive Glove Glances
St. Louis left town 2.5 games out of the last wild-card spot at 66-63. Cincinnati sat 7 back at 61-67 and headed into a nine-game road trip. One out from a series split and a breath of air, the Reds instead gifted the Cardinals a series win and a pulse. Myers understood the calendar. “It’s tough, especially at this time of year, kind of feeling like we need every win, especially ones that we kind of have in hand like that one,” he said. “But it’s part of it; we’ll wake up and play tomorrow.”
I buy the accountability. I do not buy the shrug. Communication and shading put Myers in position. The sun made Friedl a liability. The glove failure was human. The walks that followed were structural. You cannot run a contender’s bullpen if one routine fly ball produces six unearned runs and forces four pitchers into a single frame. That is the real indictment sitting under the highlight.
Day games at Great American will keep producing sun problems in left. Defensive replacements will keep arriving cold. The Reds’ margin for those variables is already gone. Myers made the right call and still owns the error. The rest of the ninth owned the loss. That is the split this club has to fix before the road trip turns into a eulogy.
