CINCINNATI — Reds left fielder Spencer Steer knew he’d hammered the changeup from Los Angeles Angels starter George Klassen, but he had little faith it’d stay fair.

“It started pretty much on the line,” Steer said. “I was kind of willing that ball fair.”

Steer started the Reds’ four-run first inning with a walk and made the score 5-0 with his second-inning home run, which bounced off the foul pole in left field, earning those in attendance a free Chick-fil-A sandwich coupon. Friday night, Steer hit two balls to the outfield that would’ve found the stands in the later months of the season at Great American Ball Park, only to be caught on the warning track. So you can forgive him for thinking the laser beam down the left-field line he hit off Klassen might curve foul.

However, the hollow metallic sound of the baseball on the yellow pole told him everything he needed to know, echoing throughout the ballpark and allowing Steer to calmly trot around the bases for his second homer of the season.

DOINK@spenc__er x #RootedInRed pic.twitter.com/MtePHu8IZw

— Cincinnati Reds (@Reds) April 11, 2026

The Reds, who entered Saturday’s game with the fewest runs scored in Major League Baseball (31), scored a season-high seven runs en route to a 7-3 victory, snapping a three-game losing streak.

“It’s nice to see one fall,” Steer said. “That’s the process, not getting too wrapped up in results. If you’re worried about results and results-oriented, this game will eat you alive.”

Despite the struggle to score runs early in the season, Cincinnati has a 9-6 record and is part of a jumbled National League Central in which four of the five teams have winning records.

“The team is still finding our identity as an offense,” said Reds first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, who cleared the bases with a three-run double in the first inning. “It’s April 11, so last I checked, we have a lot of leeway ahead of us. I’m definitely confident in this group that we’re going to bust out and get consistent, and we’re going to like it a lot.”

The Reds walked nine Angels batters, but Los Angeles pitchers also walked nine Cincinnati batters. The Reds got timely hitting from Lowe in the first, then capitalized on four walks and three wild pitches by Angels right-hander Chase Silseth in the eighth inning to plate two more. Closer Emilio Pagán was already warming up and entered the game with a lead of more than two runs for the first time this season.

“You don’t care if it’s passed balls or hits; however it happens, as long as you extend the lead there in the eighth and kind of kick them when they’re down, for lack of a better term, that’s what good teams do,” said Lowe, who was part of the Texas Rangers’ World Series team in 2023.

The Angels had runners in scoring position in each of the first six innings Saturday but scored just three runs, stranding 10 batters (the same number as the Reds). The Reds had a pair of double plays, and catcher Tyler Stephenson challenged a 1-2 ball call to Jo Adell that was overturned with two outs, ending the sixth inning and stranding leadoff man Zach Neto on second.

“We did some good things. We had to, because we did some uncharacteristic things like walking that many people,” Reds manager Terry Francona said. “That doesn’t usually lend itself to a crisp game, but fortunately, we caught the ball and turned a few double plays.”

It is still early, and other teams expected to produce offensively — such as the Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox — have yet to do so.

“You don’t want to stare at stats when the scoreboard’s up there with a lot of 1s and low 2s in batting average numbers,” Lowe said. “But I just think that when that normalizes, a lot of guys are going to relax and we’re going to produce a lot more runs, which in turn helps the pitching staff, and then we’ll just play better baseball.”