Terry Francona Calls Out Reds' Sloppy Play After Ugly 9-1 Loss to Mets

The Cincinnati Reds had a chance to sweep the New York Mets on Wednesday and build some real momentum heading into the second half of June.

Instead, they turned in one of their most lifeless games of the year, falling 9-1 at Great American Ball Park in a game that got out of hand early and never got better.

Starter Nick Lodolo gave up seven runs and 11 hits in just four and two-thirds innings while the offense could only manage five hits all afternoon, just three of them against Mets rookie Nolan McLean.

Matt McLain committed a fielding error that kept an inning alive, adding to a pattern of messy play that has been hanging over this team for weeks.

The only run Cincinnati scored came on a JJ Bleday sacrifice fly after a Mets error, meaning the Reds did not even create their own run through good offense.

After the loss, manager Terry Francona addressed the team's struggles with a message that has become a familiar theme throughout this season.

"I do think for us to be the team we want to be, we have to play very clean baseball," Francona said. "We haven't done that as well as we'd like to."

It is a message Francona has been pushing since he took the job in Cincinnati, and for a while early in the season it looked like the players were listening.

The Reds opened 2026 without committing a single error through their first 10 games and sat in first place in the NL Central through most of April.

But the good times did not last.

Cincinnati now sits at 35-38, last in the NL Central and 11 games behind the first-place Milwaukee Brewers.

They are just 4-6 in their last 10 games, and the month of June started with a painful 1-6 stretch that dropped them to a season-worst three games under .500 at the time.

Two wins over the Mets earlier in the week helped stop the bleeding, but Wednesday's blowout showed how quickly things can fall apart for this group.

The issues run deeper than one bad afternoon.

The Reds rank near the bottom of the league in team batting average and have not been able to string together the kind of quality at-bats Francona wants from his lineup.

The defense has been shaky, the bullpen has been among the worst in baseball lately, and with the trade deadline getting closer there is growing pressure on the front office to figure out whether this team should be buying or selling.

Francona has made it clear he is not going to turn on his guys, even as the losses pile up.

But his call for clean baseball is starting to feel less like a rallying cry and more like a plea that keeps going unanswered.

If the Reds want to avoid seeing key players shipped off at the deadline, they need to start playing the kind of baseball Francona has been asking for all year.