in our mind, we could not just skill our way through Canada.The

CINCINNATI -- Archie Bradley has been good at pitching out of threats lately. With two runners aboard, he couldnt keep one away from Joey Votto, and it cost him a game.Votto extended his post-All Star break surge with a three-run homer off Bradley, and Dan Straily pitched six innings on Friday night, leading the Cincinnati Reds to a 6-2 victory over the slumping Arizona Diamondbacks.The Reds got the better in a matchup of last-place clubs. The Diamondbacks began the day with second-year manager Chip Hale hearing reports that the team had considered changing managers. Arizona has dropped 16 of 20.Hales only comment: I would just say youre never surprised in this game about anything.Votto connected in the first inning off Bradley (3-6), who had a rough time on a hot, humid night. He lasted five innings, walked five and threw only 59 strikes out of 105 pitches.I think theres only one inning out of my last three starts where I went the whole inning out of the windup, Bradley said. Thats a lot of stress, a lot of high-pressure situations.Its the walks. They say if youre going to play with fire, youre eventually going to get burned. Tonight I did. Time after time, I keep putting myself in bad situations.Votto has hit safely in all seven games since the All-Star break, going 12 for 23 with a double, three homers, eight RBI and seven walks.Tucker Barnhart added a solo homer in the sixth off Randall Delgado. Brandon Phillips later singled home a run, extending his hitting streak to 10 games. Zack Cozart had an RBI double in the eighth as the Reds got four walks, a single, a double and a homer off Arizonas young relievers in three innings.There are places where guys without a great amount of experience are getting some experience, Hale said.Straily (5-6) made his fourth straight quality start, settling down after a rough first inning. Jean Segura opened the game with a homer, and Michael Bourn doubled and scored on Welington Castillos sacrifice fly. Straily gave up five hits in six innings.Bradley gave the lead right back with an even worse opening inning. Billy Hamilton singled, Cozart walked, and Votto followed with his 17th homer before the Reds made an out. Cincinnati had three hits, two walks and a hit batter during the inning.Hamilton singled twice and stole three bases off Bradley in the first two innings.The game got heated in the third inning. In his next at-bat following his homer, Segura was plunked in the lower back by Strailys first pitch. Segura motioned toward the mound with his left hand and said something to the pitcher. Plate umpire Carlos Torres got between Segura and catcher Barnhart and restored calm.BIG CHANGEHamilton opened the Reds first with a single and was called out at second base on a steal attempt. A video review showed he got his hand on the base before Seguras tag, and the call was overturned. Hamilton scored on Vottos homer.STATSThe Diamondbacks have won eight of their last 11 against the Reds. They had won five straight at Great American Ball Park before the loss on Friday. ... Bradley had a 1.57 ERA in his four previous road starts. ... It was Seguras fourth career leadoff homer, his third this season. ... Hamilton is 9 for 22 during a five-game hitting streak. His three steals gave him 30 for the season. His career high is 57 last season.TRAINERS ROOMDiamondbacks: RHP Zach Greinke will have a full bullpen session on Saturday and the Diamondbacks will decide whether hes ready to pitch in a simulated game. Greinke has been on the DL since July 3 with a strained left oblique.Reds: RHP Homer Bailey will make another minor league rehab start on Monday and the club will decide if hes ready to be activated. Bailey had Tommy John surgery a year ago.UP NEXTDiamondbacks: LHP Robbie Ray (5-8) pitched seven shutout innings in a win over the Dodgers in his last game. Hes faced the Reds one other time, taking the loss last year while giving up three runs in six innings.Reds: RHP Keyvius Sampson (0-1) makes his first start of the season after seven relief appearances. Hes 2-6 career as a starter with a 6.66 ERA.---Follow Joe Kay on Twitter: http://twitter.com/apjoekay Discount Yeezy 350 Sale . -- Hunter Smith scored the winner with just 12 seconds remaining in the third period as the Oshawa Generals edged the host Sarnia Sting 5-4 on Friday in Ontario Hockey League action. Yeezy Boost 350 For Sale Cheap . Michell Burger, a woman who lives on an estate next to Pistorius gated community, said she and her husband were awoken by the screams in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 14 last year, when Pistorius killed Reeva Steenkamp by shooting four times through a door in his bathroom. http://www.discountyeezy350.com/ . -- PGA TOUR Canada member Steve Saunders took a three-stroke lead Saturday in the Web. Yeezy Boost 350 China Wholesale . Pirlo limped out of Sundays 1-0 win over Udinese after just 13 minutes. Juventus says Pirlo underwent tests on Monday which revealed he has "a second-degree lesion to the collateral medial ligament in his right knee. Cheap Yeezy Boost 350 China . Brett Kulak and Jackson Houck of the Vancouver Giants were each charged with assault causing bodily harm on Aug. 18, according to the B.C. court services. TORONTO -- Some time ago, I likened Team USAs chances at the World Cup of Hockey to a grand experiment.Because GM Dean Lombardi and his management team purposefully eschewed more talented players in the hopes of building an American team that could quickly become more than the sum of its parts, there was great anticipation about how the experiment would play out in Toronto.Well sum it up in one word: Kaboom.Two days after the U.S. was whipped 4-2 by Canada, which effectively ended its tournament just two games in, the dust is still settling around Team USA from the rafters. How long the reverberations from the disaster in Toronto will last -- well, thats a different matter altogether.Lombardi addressed the issues about how his team was built and why it failed so miserably at the World Cup for the first time on Thursday. Like Team USA head coach John Tortorella, he defended the roster construction.Fair enough. The razor-thin edge that Lombardi has always walked along with the?Los Angeles Kings?has been his devotion to his players. That kind of unwavering belief has earned him two Stanley Cup championships -- as well as contracts that will haunt him for years, and perhaps making winning more championships impossible.The reason we won [was because] we were a frickin team and that was a culture, Lombardi said of his Kings.Building a team for an NHL season is a different beast than building one to play in a brutally short tournament such as the World Cup, and in the end those differences werent fully recognized. Or if they were recognized, they were essentially ignored.Lombardi was predictably defiant in his support of his World Cup players.There were guys with tears in their eyes the other night and they were real, Lombardi said. I will always remember that. Some of the texts I got from players yesterday, I will treasure them the rest of my life. That is good stuff. Those are things you dont forget, even in failure. That part we got down. I told them I wish I had this group for a longer period of time, because I know we could have built that culture. But it didnt happen.The uncomfortable truth is that either heart -- which was which the key building block for this team -- cant trump skill or, worse, that Team USA simply didnt collectively possess the heart Lombardi or anyone else thought it did.When the Americans came out flat against Team Europe and lost 3-0 in a game they had to win to set themselves up for a trip to the tournament semifinals, it turned out that the lightly regarded Europeans showed greater heart.Lombardi bristled at the notion that somehow Team Europe, basically the hockey equivalent of a lean-to made out of branches and old string, with players pulled together from eight different countries, found a winning culture in a matter of days while Team USA, which included 14 members of the Sochi Olympic squad and nine members of the U.S. team that won a silver medal in 2010 in Vancouver, could not.But thats exactly what happened.So Team Europe will play against Sweden iin the semifinals Sunday afternoon (1 ET, ESPN) while Team USA is headed home after a meaningless third preliminary-round game against the Czech Republic on Thursday night, with the echoes of sharp criticism from the media and needling from former players such as?Phil Kessel,?who was left off the World Cup roster, still ringing in their ears.ddddddddddddLombardi did admit that Team USA either didnt understand or properly respond to the urgency required to overcome a European team that was considered among the weakest of the eight teams in the World Cup field.Lombardi has seen his Kings team rally from a 3-0 series deficit to win a playoff series. Thats the proverbial 8-ball, Lombardi said.When Team USA lost to Europe? This felt like a boulder, Lombardi said. It was just really strange. Like, how can this happen so quickly, where your back is against the wall after one poor game?Lombardi suggested it was almost as though the team cared too much and became paralyzed by it.Isnt having heart the opposite of that?Isnt having heart rising above those kinds of setbacks, of pushing aside the disappointment to find success?If that is so, where was it?Few people in the game are as detail-oriented as Lombardi who built those two Stanley Cup winners as GM of the Kings and wanted desperately to pay homage to past U.S. hockey glory by building a winner here.He believed that in order to do that he needed a team that could compete with Canada. He believed that, lacking the skill that Canada possesses, his U.S. squad could balance the equation by adding more heart and character.Tortorella was brutally frank about the disparity between the two hockey neighbors.Ill be honest: were not as deep as Canada, skillwise, Tortorella said. Not sure USA Hockey will like me saying that, but its the truth. Its a situation where I still think, in our mind, we could not just skill our way through Canada.The problem with the theory is that it suggests that skill and heart -- or grit -- are mutually exclusive. For Canada, skill and heart are mutually inclusive. It can be so for the Americans as well, as it was 20 years ago when the U.S. beat Canada at the inaugural World Cup of Hockey in 1996.By the time the next best-on-best tournament rolls around, maybe it will be so again.Maybe Auston Matthews, Johnny Gaudreau, Jack Eichel, Shayne Gostisbehere, Vincent Trocheck and all the other shiny young Americans who have made Team North America the darlings of the World Cup will allow the U.S. team builders to rethink the formula for success at these kinds of tournaments -- or to simply bring their best players because they will represent the same kind of balance that Canada has enjoyed for an entire generation.Who knows, maybe the memory of this experiment gone so horribly wrong in Toronto will become a historic turning point for American hockey.An explosion that cleared land for a new future. ' ' '