Cincinnati got out of Milwaukee with a 4-3 win on Sunday, and the whole afternoon came down to one swing from a familiar bat. Eugenio Suárez hit a three-run homer in the sixth inning, Tyler Stephenson added a sacrifice fly in the eighth, and that was the entire Reds offense in the Reds vs Brewers finale. Four runs. One-run margin. A road trip that no longer reads as a total loss.
That last part matters more than the box score suggests. A winless trip follows a September club around like a stray dog. You carry it into the flight, into the clubhouse, into the next series. Cincinnati doesn't have to carry it.
Who hit the big home run in the Reds vs Brewers game Sunday
Suárez, and of course it was Suárez. He came up with three men's worth of damage available and did the thing he has done for a decade: turned a quiet inning into a loud one in about four seconds. Stephenson's sacrifice fly two innings later was the unglamorous half of the same job, a ball hit far enough to matter and nothing more. Every run Cincinnati scored Sunday arrived in those two at-bats.
Milwaukee scored three. In a game where the visiting team only touched the plate twice all day, three was almost enough. Almost is the cruelest word in a September finale.
Why Eugenio Suárez matters to Cincinnati
Because he has been here before, wearing this uniform, in this building. Suárez came up through the Reds' rebuild years and became the guy you organized the lineup around, and in 2019 he hit 49 home runs for a team that mostly wasn't going anywhere. Then the front office moved him to Seattle in the spring of 2022, the way front offices move good players who cost money, and Cincinnati spent the years after that trying to replace the exact shape of production he provided.
He kept providing it elsewhere. Checked the almanac: in April of 2025 Suárez hit four home runs in a single game in Atlanta, which puts him on a list that has fewer names than you'd think for a sport that has been played this long. One beat of wonder for that, and then back to Sunday, where the same bat and the same swing path decided a one-run game against a division rival.
There is something genuinely good about a guy getting a second act in the city that developed him and then winning a game there in September. Baseball rarely arranges the story that neatly. When it does, you notice.
What's next for the Reds
Cincinnati is home Monday night for the Dodgers at 6:41 ET, which is the schedule's way of saying congratulations on the road win, here comes the hard part. The Reds spent Sunday scoring four runs on two productive at-bats. That works against anybody once. It works considerably less often across a series against a team with that kind of rotation depth.
What I want to see Monday is whether the offense that showed up in the sixth inning in Milwaukee is a pulse or a blip. Two swings is not an offense, it's a rescue. Stephenson driving in runs without needing the ball to leave the yard is the version of this lineup that travels best in September, when the weather cools, the ball stops carrying, and the sacrifice fly quietly becomes a real weapon again.
For Milwaukee, the loss stings in the way late-season one-run losses always do, but this is a club that has spent the season proving it can absorb a bad afternoon and come back the next day looking fine. One finale doesn't change what they are. It just means the sweep sat right there on the table and nobody picked it up.
I'll be watching Cincinnati's at-bats with runners on Monday night. That's the tell for whether Sunday was the start of something or just Suárez being Suárez one more time.