Brown’s Return Is Spoiled

This was not vintage Kevin Brown on the Dodger Stadium mound Tuesday night. Four batters into his return from the disabled list, the Dodger ace left a two-strike fastball over the plate to Adam Dunn, who belted it for a two-run home run to catapult the Cincinnati Reds toward a 3-1 victory before a crowd of 25,178.

Brown nearly fell off the mound when the spikes on his landing foot got caught in the dirt on a second-inning pitch. He threw wild past first base on a fourth-inning pick-off attempt for a two-base error.

Brown escaped first-and-third jams in the third and fourth innings, but he struggled with his command throughout much of his five-inning, 84-pitch stint, giving up two runs on five hits, striking out five and walking one.

There was no discomfort in Brown’s surgically repaired right elbow, no lingering effects from the tearing of scar tissue that knocked him out of his last start in the second inning of an April 13 game at San Diego, and for that the Dodgers and Brown were thankful.

But it will likely take a few more starts before the power pitcher returns to the dominant form that Brown and the Dodgers expect.

“I can’t put a timetable on when I’ll have my good rhythm,” Brown said. “You do everything you can to shorten that period, but you have no idea when it will happen. It might be my next pitch. That might be the pitch that puts it all together.”

It certainly wasn’t that 0-2 pitch to Dunn in the first inning Tuesday night, a ball that landed in the left-field pavilion and gave Dunn home runs in three consecutive at-bats, the first Reds’ player to accomplish that feat since Bret Boone’s three-homer game against the Chicago Cubs in Wrigley Field on Sept. 28, 1998.

“I left a fastball over the plate--that’s not a good pitch with an 0-2 count,” Brown said. “If I made a better pitch in that situation, it would have made a difference.”

That’s because Red starter Chris Reitsma left Brown virtually no room for error. The right-hander used a devastating changeup to thwart several potential rallies and allowed only one run on eight hits in six innings to an offense that had produced 35 runs in six games on a trip to Pittsburgh and Chicago.

That enabled the surprising Reds, who are atop the National League Central division, to win for the seventh time in their last nine games in Dodger Stadium.

“His big pitch is a changeup, and he continued to go to it when he was behind in the count,” Manager Jim Tracy said of Reitsma. “It was very apparent when he’s in trouble that the changeup is the pitch he was going to, and we couldn’t do anything with it. We swung as if we were still anticipating a fastball.”

Reitsma, in his second big league season, struck out Brian Jordan on a changeup to end the first inning with runners on second and third. Right fielder Austin Kearns bailed Reitsma out of trouble in the second when he raced into the gap and made a spectacular diving catch of Dave Roberts’ drive to end the inning with runners on first and third.

Reitsma struck out Shawn Green with a nice changeup in the third, and he minimized damage in the fifth when he gave up only one run after the Dodgers loaded the bases with no outs on Alex Cora’s pinch-hit double and singles by Dave Roberts and Cesar Izturis.

But Paul Lo Duca bounced into a 4-6-3 double play, Cora scoring to pull the Dodgers within 2-1, and Green flied to left. The Dodgers also had two on with two out in the sixth, but Reitsma struck out pinch-hitter Hiram Bocachica on a changeup.

“He’s a finesse pitcher, he doesn’t want to come at you much, but he throws that pitch well, he throws it for strikes, and he throws it out of the zone when he wants to,” Dodger second baseman Mark Grudzielanek said. “When you have something like that, you stick with it.”

The Reds added an insurance run in the ninth when Todd Walker walked and reliever Giovanni Carrara drilled Kearns in the helmet with a fastball. Kearns, who was pulled for a pinch-runner, suffered a cut on his forehead and had a severe headache, and he will undergo tests today.

Catcher Corky Miller was then hit by a pitch to load the bases, the 118th time the Reds’ catcher has been hit by a pitch in 380 professional games, and Wilton Guerrero hit a bloop RBI single to right for a 3-1 lead. Red closer Danny Graves pitched a scoreless ninth.