After Gerrit Cole’s short start against the Cardinals last week, I started to worry. With AJ Burnett out and both Charlie Morton and Jeff Locke struggling more often than not, seeing Cole fail to get out of the sixth inning in two of three starts (with a six inning start in the other) felt like it could be the harbinger of something bad. The Pirate offense has started to come around of late, but the reason that they were sitting at 20+ games over .500 in late August was the unexpected success of the pitching staff. That’s always felt a bit fragile to me, and I was worried the Pirates were starting to come unraveled, even if the offense had been carrying them to wins.
The offense slugged them past the Cardinals in the series finale, and so the Pirates went off to CitiField on something of a high note. As I noted on Friday, the series was a bit of an interesting situation to watch because the Mets have been red-hot, and the Pirates would start JA Happ, Charlie Morton, and Jeff Locke. Of course, the Pirates swept the Mets, made up a game on the Cardinals, put a bit of extra space between themselves and the Cubs, and kept themselves six games ahead of the Giants, who are really the only team with a shot at taking a playoff spot away from them at this point. In other words, it was as good of a weekend as possible, and it concluded a run of nine games against the current NL division leaders for the Pirates in which they went 7-2.
The interesting part of the weekend, though, wasn’t Happ or Morton or Locke. That’s not to say that they didn’t pitch well, because they all did. Happ and Locke didn’t pitch out of the sixth, though, and Morton didn’t pitch out of the seventh. The bullpen shined this weekend, though, in what must be the culmination of what Neal Huntington hoped to see after overhauling the bullpen both this winter and at the trade deadline. Let’s go through the three bullpen performances, game by game.
On Friday, Jared Hughes relieved Happ in the sixth, after Happ served up a homer to Yoenis Cespedes and a double to David Murphy. Hughes got two quick outs to keep the game tied at two in the sixth, and set the Mets down in order in the seventh. Antonio Bastardo pitched a perfect eighth, Arquimedes Caminero had an easy ninth, and Mark Melancon saved in the tenth. The Pirates used four relievers without using Joakim Soria or Tony Watson, but the only reliever to allow a run was Melancon with a 3-1 lead in the tenth. On Saturday, Morton got in trouble in the seventh, facing the middle of the Mets’ lineup for the third time, giving up two home runs in four batters to turn a 3-0 Pirate lead into a tie game. Joakim Soria closed out the inning, Tony Watson was perfect in the eighth, Caminero faced four batters in the ninth, Jared Hughes saw three in the tenth, Joe Blanton dominated through the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth (six strikeouts, one walk, one hit), and Melancon again closed out the win in the fourteenth. On Sunday, Jeff Locke got in trouble in the sixth just as the rain started, Caminero came out after the rain to record two quick outs to get out of the jam, the Pirate offense exploded for seven runs, Antonio Bastardo threw two perfect innings, and Soria struck out two hitters in the ninth to seal the win.
We know what Melancon, Watson, Hughes, and even Soria are capable of, but what impressed me this weekend was Caminero, Blanton, and Bastardo. That trio combined for 8 2/3 innings over the three games. They allowed no runs, scattered three hits, walked two, and struck out 13 Mets hitters. Each of the three starters came out of the game after getting in trouble against the Mets lineup the third time through, and the bullpen held the Mets at bay long enough in each game for the offense to come through in some fashion.
If you, like me, found yourself wondering how the Pirates could possibly sustain a high winning percentage with a rotation made up of Happ, Locke, Morton, and a possibly tiring Gerrit Cole, the team provided us with an answer this weekend. Get through the lineup twice, remove the starter at the first sign of trouble thereafter, and leave it to the bullpen to do the rest. With Soria and Blanton on the team and Caminero and Bastardo pitching well (neither has allowed a run in August), that might be a sustainable model for this club down the stretch. It’s obviously a little precarious, as Happ, Morton, Locke, Bastardo, Caminero, and probably Blanton (I don’t know if we know enough about this year’s Joe Blanton) are all very volatile pitchers, but it’s at least a workable model while the Pirates sort out Burnett’s injury and potential return, Happ, Locke, and Morton. The Pirates are probably eyeing a little more than that, though: last year’s playoffs included a couple of teams that rode their bullpens hard into the World Series, and the moves the Pirates made at the deadline were almost certainly done with an eye towards that. We’ll need to see a bit more than a couple of good weeks from Bastardo, Caminero, and Blanton, but the August returns for this new Pirate bullpen look pretty good.
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