The Dodgers spent four innings taking Cincinnati's options off the board

The 8-2 final starts with Cincinnati's starter giving Los Angeles too many complete at-bats. Brady Singer lasted 3.1 innings, allowed seven earned runs on nine hits and four walks, and did not record a strikeout. That is not just an ugly line; it is a game-state problem. A starter with no punchouts has to live on quick outs and command, and Singer had neither. The Dodgers sent 24 batters through his outing, and 50 of his 96 pitches were sinkers.

When a club keeps seeing the same pitch and nobody is being removed from the inning with a strikeout, traffic has time to become damage. Kyle Tucker's two-run homer in the first got Los Angeles moving. Tucker's RBI double in the second added to it. Max Muncy's two-run double in the fourth turned a bad afternoon into a long one. I understand the instinct to squeeze one more out from a starter and protect the rest of the day. That calculation gets shaky when the starter has shown no swing-and-miss escape hatch at all. By the time Singer was done, the Reds were not managing a tight game. They were managing the receipt from one.

Justin Wrobleski gave Los Angeles exactly the kind of opening that lets early runs matter. He retired all nine batters he faced over three innings, allowed no hits, allowed no walks, struck out three, and needed only 32 pitches to do it. Cincinnati never got the ordinary early answer a home team wants: a baserunner, a messy inning, some reason to think the game might wobble back toward the middle.

The first three innings were clean in the most useful way. Wrobleski opened with a lineout and back-to-back strikeouts in the first. He followed with two groundouts and a flyout in the second. The third was two flyouts and another strikeout. No traffic, no extra pitches, no invitation. That matters because Tucker's first-inning homer and second-inning RBI double were not being played over a shaky lead. They were being played over a game Cincinnati had not yet entered on the bases. We do not have to invent a dramatic reason for the fourth-inning change. The visible point is simpler: Los Angeles got three perfect innings from its starter, and that made every early Reds pitching problem feel heavier on the other side.

Tucker did not just post the loudest line in the game. He kept converting manageable trouble into runs Singer had to wear. Tucker went 4-for-5 with a home run, two doubles, three RBIs, and two runs scored. The first blow was the two-run homer in the opening inning after Freddie Freeman's walk. The next was a two-out RBI double in the second. Later he added a single in the fourth and another double in the eighth. That is not one big swing wrapped in filler. That is repeated conversion.

Days like that change how a pitching line feels. A walk can be survived. A little traffic can be survived. Even a rough inning can sometimes be trimmed back to one mistake. Tucker kept refusing to give Cincinnati that cheaper version of the damage. His first two scoring swings built the early separation, and the rest of the afternoon kept reminding the Reds that Singer's trouble had not been a fluke inning that could be filed away. Baseball likes to make the star seem inevitable after the box score settles. This one was less inevitable than persistent. Every time the door was left cracked, Tucker seemed to be the one walking through it.

Luis Mey actually gave Cincinnati the kind of relief patch that can keep a bad afternoon from becoming a full collapse. He entered in the fourth with runners on first and third and one out, struck out Hunter Feduccia, got Alex Freeland on a groundout, and stranded both inherited runners. He then worked a scoreless fifth. That is useful relief work, and it is worth saying plainly because not every ugly game stays ugly for the same reason.

This matters because the lazy version of the fourth inning is to treat it as one endless avalanche. It was not. The Reds did find a competent stop once Singer left. Mey kept the score from getting worse right there and bought the lineup a little time. The trouble was that the bill was already on the table. Los Angeles had already gotten the two-run double from Muncy in the inning, and Wrobleski had already banked three perfect frames on the other side. Good relief can stop bleeding. It cannot erase the earlier damage or give back the options that damage removed. Mey's work did not change the shape of the game so much as confirm where the real trouble had started.

Once Los Angeles turned the game over to Landon Knack, Cincinnati's route back got narrow in a hurry. Knack covered four scoreless innings from the fifth through the eighth, allowed four hits, walked nobody, struck out two, and threw 61 pitches. That is the sort of multi-inning relief outing managers dream about because it saves both the lead and the rest of the bullpen board. The Reds were not being asked to solve a parade of arms. They were being asked to solve the same pitcher for four innings without the gift of free baserunners.

The zero in the walk column is the quiet part of the outing. Cincinnati did get contact, including Hector Rodriguez's two-out triple in the fifth, but Knack kept the inning from expanding into a traffic problem. No walks means no cheap second runner, no extra scrambling, no reason for Los Angeles to start burning through matchup choices. For a dugout, that is a comfortable kind of evening: one long bridge, very little improvising, and the late innings arriving with the game living in the same place it had lived for hours.