Dodgers' Chad Billingsley isn't dealing like an ace

FROM CINCINNATI — There was no mistaking what happened to Chad Billingsley on Friday.

He was hit in the Dodgers' 4-2 defeat to the Cincinnati Reds and he was hit hard.

The road back to the form that made him an All-Star this summer took a violent and abrupt detour back to pitching purgatory at Great American Ball Park. The Dodgers weren't able to add to the momentum they built by taking the last two games of their three-game series in Colorado.

Billingsley said he has to forget about this start, but acknowledged that not thinking about games like this has become increasingly difficult.

"Are you asking if I think about it all the time?" Billingsley asked. "I mean, how can't you? How can't you?"

The unquestioned ace of the staff in the first half of the season, Billingsley (12-8) has won only three times in his last 13 starts, posting a 5.61 earned-run average in that span.

Beset by command problems Friday, he was charged with four runs and seven hits in five innings. He walked four and struck out only one.

Billingsley gave up a run in the second, two in the third and a solo home run to Jonny Gomes leading off the sixth.

Only a day removed from facing the second-place Rockies in a playoff-type atmosphere, the Dodgers' hitters looked as if they were unable to get themselves up for a game against an out-of-contention Reds team played in front of empty seats.

That doomed Billingsley for defeat, as the Dodgers' offense did nothing until a two-run ninth inning. Reds starter Homer Bailey (4-4), who was pounded for nine runs in 2 2/3 innings at Dodger Stadium on July 21, struck out seven batters over eight scoreless innings in the night of his life.

Making this an even more maddening stretch of games for Billingsley is that the decline of his performance has coincided with the shrinking of the Dodgers' lead in the West.

"It's definitely frustrating, not pitching well late in the season," Billingsley said. "I just haven't able to. . . . I don't know what it is. . . . It's just when I try to make a quality pitch right now, it goes over the plate."

The problem has become psychological, Billingsley acknowledged, as he said he has often found himself trying to do too much on the mound.

Manager Joe Torre said that Billingsley's words matched his own observations.