Burnes finishes first half on a high note in Crew win

MILWAUKEE -- Corbin Burnes set such a high standard over the past two seasons that his first-half statistics leave something to be desired. The strikeouts are down. The walks are up. He’s had about as many days with an ERA north of 4.00 (48) as days below (51).

But with back-to-back clinics against the Pirates and Reds, Burnes went into the All-Star break on a high.

Joey Wiemer and Willy Adames each hit two-run home runs as Milwaukee became the first team to rough-up Reds rookie left-hander Andrew Abbott, and Burnes delivered six quality innings for a wire-to-wire, 7-3 win at American Family Field on Friday. With Devin Williams’ 19th save, the Brewers pulled back within a game of the first-place Reds in the National League Central standings with five head-to-head games still to play in this stretch -- two more before the break in Milwaukee, then three in Cincinnati to start the second half.

“We play them six less times this year -- each team in our division -- so it makes those games a little more important,” Burnes said. “So they’re definitely important, but we’ve got to look at the schedule and realize we’re in mid-July and we have a lot of baseball ahead of us.

“If we can keep playing good baseball, then we’ll be where we want to be.”

The same can be said of Burnes, who carried a perfect game into the sixth inning of his previous start in Pittsburgh before the strike zone squeezed and the Pirates struck for a hit and a couple of runs, then faced the minimum through four hitless innings against the Reds and wound up pitching through the sixth.

"The first three innings was probably the best stuff we've seen all year,” Reds manager David Bell said.

Rookie sensation Elly De La Cruz broke up the no-hit bid when he floated a single to left field leading off the fifth, two batters before Joey Votto launched a two-run home run to the second deck in right field to cut Milwaukee’s lead to 4-2. That was the only damage against Burnes, who is still walking more hitters than he’d like (four on Friday and 39 so far this season compared to 51 all of 2022) but did manage to drop his ERA back down to 3.94 with 107 1/3 innings in the books.

“The big innings killed me in the first half,” Burnes said. “If we can minimize those innings, the numbers will look a lot better.”

Asked to assess Burnes’ first half, Brewers manager Craig Counsell said, “I think he goes into the break knowing he's got 13-15 big starts left. That's it. I don't think it's time to look backwards, it's time to look forward.”

Brewers hitters gave Burnes plenty of room for error by plating six runs, all earned, in the 4 1/3 innings worked by Abbott. Including his stellar Major League debut against the Brewers at Great American Ball Park on June 5 (six innings, one hit, no runs), Abbott had allowed only five runs over his first six big league starts.

The Brewers became the first team to see him a second time, and that, it appears, made a difference.

“He's had a lot of success so far in this league in his six starts, and any time you hit a bunch of balls hard against a pitcher, they're going to kind of start thinking, 'Do I need to do something different and change something up?'” Counsell said. “I thought we did a nice job just being 'offensive' right away and kind of putting him in a mode that he hasn't been in, really, since he’s been in the big leagues.”

The pressure started with consecutive doubles from William Contreras, Adames and Owen Miller in the first inning for two runs, and homers for Wiemer in the second and Adames in the fifth, when the Brewers extended their lead back out to 6-2. Milwaukee surpassed six runs for the seventh time in the last eight games.

The Brewers’ 12 runners left on base were one shy of a season high. Their 14 hits were two shy of a season high. That’s a combination they’ll typically accept, especially against the team they’re chasing in the division standings.

“I know we left a lot of runners on base tonight,” Miller said, “but that just goes to show you how many guys we did have on base. We kept putting pressure on them the whole game.”