Daylen Lile helped turn one hard swing into a troubling night for Cincinnati. The Washington Nationals beat the Reds 10-4 on May 12 at Great American Ball Park, with Lile and Luís Garcia Jr. each hitting two home runs in a game Washington finished with six.

The turning point came in the fifth inning, when Washington broke open a 3-2 game and moved ahead 7-2 after back-to-back home runs from Garcia and Lile. Lile’s shot was a three-run drive off reliever Sam Moll. James Wood also homered, and Brady House added a two-run homer in the eighth to complete the rout.

For Cincinnati, the damage started early and never really stopped. In the second inning, a line drive off Lile’s bat struck Brady Singer on the outside of his right foot at 106.7 mph. Singer stayed in the game after being checked by Terry Francona, but he later said, “I want to see what tomorrow brings,” and added that he did not want to “screw the bullpen” coming out of the game, though he tried to do the best he could with what he had. Francona later said simply, “He was hurting.”

The Reds had a chance to change the mood in the fourth inning when they loaded the bases with no outs and scored two runs, including one on a Washington fielding error. But they could not build on it. Cincinnati finished 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position, a blunt measure of how often the offense came up empty after getting traffic on the bases. Washington’s bullpen and power bats kept the game from tightening again, and every one of Cincinnati’s five relievers who entered allowed at least one run.

Francona did not dress up the result afterward. “We sure did, we gave up some home runs,” he said. He also pointed to the bigger problem, saying the staff had to attack the strike zone better because too many pitches were either in the middle of the plate or out of the zone. That pattern was especially costly against a Washington lineup that kept finding the seats.

The loss pushed Cincinnati to 22-20 and left the club 2-9 in May after opening the month at 20-11 on April 30. The Reds were one game out of last place in the NL Central after the defeat and five games behind the division-leading Chicago Cubs. That is a sharp slide for a team already dealing with multiple injuries to its starting pitchers, and the bullpen has now been forced to absorb the fallout in games that keep slipping away early.

Lile’s night also captured the strange edge of the game itself: one swing that nearly knocked Singer out, and another that helped bury the Reds. Washington did not just win with power; it kept landing blows after Cincinnati had chances to respond, and that is what made the 10-4 score feel larger than a one-night stumble.