There was a brief moment in which I was sure this game was headed in the opposite direction. After Casey Sadler mostly cruised through the Brewers’ lineup on the first pass, he gave up a hard-hit double to Hector Gomez in the eight spot. When Carlos Gomez came up shortly after, Sadler barely got a 91 mph sinker past him on the first pitch of the at-bat, with Gomez swinging for the fences. Sadler elevated the next sinker and Gomez destroyed it, turning a 1-0 Pirate lead into a 2-1 deficit. Jean Segura followed Gomez with a sharp groundout, then Ryan Braun laced a single into left field and I was sure that the Brewers had figured Sadler out and that things were about to go very wrong for him. Then, he struck Adam Lind out to end the third inning, and it was mostly all Pirates from there on out.
The turning point didn’t actually come until the sixth inning. In the first part of the game, Andrew McCutchen didn’t seem hugely comfortable with his sore knee. After Gregory Polanco doubled and Jordy Mercer singled to lead off the sixth, though, Kyle Lohse let a first pitch slider see a little bit too much plate, and McCutchen launched it over the right-center fence to give the Pirates a 4-2 lead. That was probably more than enough for the bullpen — Jared Hughes continued his impressive early-season start, Arquimedes Caminero pitched through some control problems for a scoreless seventh, and Tony Watson zipped through the eighth — but the Pirates then piled on six runs against Tyler Thornburg in the ninth with big hits from Corey Hart, Jordy Mercer, McCutchen, and finally a three-run homer from Neil Walker.
There was plenty of offense to go around this afternoon; McCutchen ended up driving in four runs, Tony Sanchez had three hits and scored twice (notably, ROOT Sports put a viewer tweet on the air asking if Sanchez was playing his way into an expanded role; those sorts of things tend to not happen by accident), and Jung Ho Kang picked up his first big league hit. Like Friday’s game, it was a show of what the Pirate offense is capable of, and it came in a good spot with Sadler on the mound. Despite the bad luck in Cincinnati at the ugly game on Saturday night, the Pirates will return home tomorrow at 2-4.
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