Tyler Stephenson hit a tiebreaking two-run homer in the ninth inning and the Cincinnati Reds won in their first road game this season, a 5-3 victory to spoil the home opener for the Texas Rangers on Friday.<\/p>\n
Spencer Steer and Elly Del La Cruz also homered for the Reds.<\/p>\n
Steer opened the ninth with a double off reliever Chris Martin (1-1) before Stephenson lined a full-count pitch into the Rangers’ bullpen in right-center for his first homer.<\/p>\n
Tony Santillian (1-0), the fourth of five Reds pitchers, pitched a perfect eighth inning. Emilio Pag\u00e1n worked a 1-2-3 ninth for his second save.<\/p>\n
The Rangers played their first home game for new manager Skip Schumaker after taking two of three games in a series at Philadelphia and Baltimore. The last time they played six games before their home opener was 2008.<\/p>\n
Steer’s two-run homer in the second and De La Cruz going deep to lead off the sixth both came off MacKenzie Gore, the All-Star left-hander that came to Texas from Washington in January in a trade for five prospects. It was the third homer, all solo shots, for De La Cruz this season.<\/p>\n
Gore struck out nine without a walk while allowing those three runs over six innings in his first home start.<\/p>\n
Texas got even at 2 in the bottom of the second on No. 9 batter Danny Jansen’s double under the glove of diving left fielder Steer off Brady Singer, the Reds starter who struck out five and walked one while pitching into the sixth.<\/p>\n
Brandon Nimmo had a one-out triple in the Texas seventh before Wyatt Langford’s RBI double for a 3-3 tie.<\/p>\n
Up next<\/p>\n
Reds right-hander Rhett Lowder, still a rookie after making his MLB debut in 2024 and then missing all of 2025 because of forearm and oblique strains, makes his second start this season Saturday. Rangers right-hander Kumar Rocker, their No. 5 starter, makes his season debut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tyler Stephenson hit a tiebreaking two-run homer in the ninth inning and the Cincinnati Reds won in their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[363,99,2330],"class_list":["post-563324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-mlb","tag-sports","tag-texas-rangers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}