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MIL@CIN: Wilson belts a solo shot in the fifth

MILWAUKEE -- Have you heard the one about the Brewers not being able to win on the road? It's no joke.

The Brewers are the 1927 Yankees at home -- 21 wins in 28 games at Miller Park this season -- and coming off a nearly perfect homestand that manager Ron Roenicke hoped would be a springboard for a weeklong trip to Cincinnati and Florida. But the Brewers appear to be an entirely different team on the road, and a 7-3 loss to the Reds at Great American Ball Park on Monday left Milwaukee 8-18 everywhere else.

Cincinnati's riverside ballpark has been particularly unwelcoming. The Brewers have dropped all four games here this season, five straight dating to last season and 12 of their last 13 dating to July 2009.

"I don't know," said outfielder Corey Hart, who is getting a relatively fresh look at the Brewers' road woes because he spent the first month of the season on the disabled list. "I think we get so comfortable playing at home that things, for some reason, come easy. Then we come here and we know it's been rough, so we try that much harder and put that extra pressure [on].

"It's hard to handle sometimes. Obviously, we haven't done a good job at it because of the way the outcomes [have] been. We still can turn it around, but for us to be a contending team, obviously we need to figure it out pretty soon."

The second-place Brewers rallied in the fifth inning to cut a 5-0 deficit briefly to 5-3, but missed a chance to gain a game in the National League Central on the first-place Cardinals, who lost earlier on Memorial Day in San Francisco. The Brewers remain 2 1/2 games back, with the Reds another 1 1/2 games behind the Brewers.

"When you get a chance to control your own destiny against a team that's ahead of you, it's nice, and we did a good job of it tonight," said Reds outfielder Jay Bruce, who delivered Monday's dagger in the form of a three-run home run.

The Brewers fell to 3-8 when left-hander Chris Narveson (2-4) starts, and while Narveson has pitched well enough to win the majority of his outings this season, his four innings against the Reds marked his second straight stinker. He let the game get away in the fourth inning, when Cincinnati grew a 1-0 lead to 5-0 on Bruce's NL-leading 16th home run and Paul Janish's RBI single.

The inning went sour from the start. Narveson walked Joey Votto and surrendered a single on an 0-2 changeup to Scott Rolen before Bruce hit an 0-2 curveball into the right-field seats. Jonny Gomes followed by hitting a 1-2 curveball for a double, and he scored two batters later on Janish's hit.

The hanging curve to the red-hot Bruce was the killer.

"Dumb pitch," Narveson said.

Or just poor execution.

"Sometimes you get a two-strike count and you know you need to break the curveball off in the dirt. You try to throw it harder, and you hang it," Roenicke said. "The one he threw 0-1 was a great curveball. I've seen it with guys. You try to snap it off too much, and you hang it. You can't do that to that guy [Bruce]."

Bruce was not the only Reds batter who burned Narveson in the decisive fourth.

"If you look at those three batters there between Rolen, Bruce and Gomes; back-to-back-to-back guys we had two strikes on every single one, and [I] left a pitch up to every single guy," Narveson said. "If you execute it, you probably get an out. If you leave it up, they end up capitalizing on it."

Narveson wasn't exactly showing signs of wear going into that decisive inning. He'd struck out the side in the third.

"I like his stuff. When he's on, he'll go through 4-5 innings with all zeroes," Roenicke said. "We just have to stay away from that one big inning that he seems to have. I don't know what it is, what happens to him when we get people on base and he has those big innings. He's going to have to figure out how to make some pitches when he needs to."

The big fourth was Narveson's final inning, and he exited after allowing five runs on five hits, with two walks and seven strikeouts. The outing came six days after he surrendered six runs to the Nationals on eight hits in 3 1/3 innings. The Brewers spared Narveson the loss in that one by rallying for a 7-6 win.

They were headed in that direction again Monday before Reds starter Travis Wood (4-3) contained a fifth-inning Milwaukee rally. Carlos Gomez and pinch-hitter Josh Wilson connected for back-to-back solo home runs -- Wilson's was his first hit since Milwaukee plucked him off the waiver wire last week -- and Ryan Braun delivered an RBI double to cut a five-run deficit to two.

Braun has a hit in 18 of his last 19 games, with 16 RBIs in that span. His hit scored Nyjer Morgan, who took over as a pinch-runner and then as the right fielder for Hart. Hart has been sapped by an illness.

"That team over there can score some runs in a short period of time," Reds manager Dusty Baker said. "That didn't take long. You have to keep adding on runs with those guys."

So the Reds did just that.

Baker's club created some distance in the sixth inning when pinch-hitter Fred Lewis hit an RBI single and Gomez over-threw the cutoff man. Catcher Jonathan Lucroy stepped up to catch the baseball and tried a snap throw to first, where Lewis had strayed from the bag. Lucroy's high throw ticked off second baseman Rickie Weeks' glove, and Janish scored a second run as a result of the error, which was charged to Lucroy.

The Brewers will try again Tuesday night to spark a road winning streak. They have not won back-to-back games away from Miller Park since April 18-19 in Philadelphia.

"Obviously, we haven't played good on the road yet," Narveson said. "We know that's going to change eventually. We're too good a team for that to continue."

Adam McCalvy is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Brew Beat, and follow him on Twitter at @AdamMcCalvy. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.

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