ARLINGTON -- Look past the first inning of Reds starter Andrew Abbott’s outing Sunday in the series finale against the Rangers, and you’ll see a perfectly decent, perhaps even dominant, performance.

The problem for Abbott, in the Reds’ 4-3 loss at Globe Life Field, was that the Rangers made off with four runs -- which turned out to be enough to win the game -- only minutes after it began. Nothing else Abbott did the rest of the day could change that.

Still, Abbott didn’t implode after the rough start. He retired 11 consecutive batters starting with the last out of the first and scattered two hits over his final 4 1/3 scoreless innings. He kept the Reds in the game and gave his teammates a chance to win it until the last out.

Abbott chose to take solace in how effectively he pitched the rest of the way, instead of dwelling on the first inning that went awry.

“There’s a lot of positives that you can focus on in the game,” Abbott said.

A pair of first-inning, two-run homers by Adolis García and Wyatt Langford put Abbott behind immediately. Nathaniel Lowe and Jonah Heim each singled before being driven in by the homers. García’s dinger came on a curveball that Abbott said he “yanked” and left up too high in the zone, enabling García to crush it to left field. Langford’s homer -- his first in the Majors -- was an inside-the-parker to the gap in right-center, with the ball bouncing off a quirky angle in the wall and rattling around.

“Just misexecution on two pitches, really -- two good swings by them, that ended up being the difference,” Abbott said. “You kind of have to flip the script on that and just say, ‘Hey, I got to go as long as I can after an inning like that,’ and just try to hold them to give us a chance to win. We didn’t win, but saved the bullpen and saved arms for the rest of the road trip.”

The Reds rallied for three runs in the sixth inning, then had men on first and second in the ninth before Luke Maile smoked a line drive that went almost directly into Rangers third baseman Josh Smith’s glove.

Without venturing as far as the dreaded “moral victory” talk, Reds manager David Bell praised his club for shaking off the early stumbles. Bell was particularly encouraged by Abbott’s resilience.

“We talked about, sometimes those starts are the most important to our team,” Bell said. “You get off to a tough start, to be able to retire 11 straight after that, to be able to keep it together, keep us right there. We’re going to win a lot of those games ... if we continue to play like that, we’re going to be in really, really good shape.”