It’s hard to imagine a more picturesque afternoon at PNC Park than this one: Josh Harrison hit the first pitch in the bottom of the first over the fence, Gerrit Cole kept the Tigers off balance for six innings with a fastball that averaged 97 mph and a ton of swinging strikes on his off-speed pitches (PitchFX says that he threw 22 sliders/curves (though I guess one of those might have been a changeup), and he got eight swinging strikes on those 22 pitches). When Cole got into trouble in the seventh, Jared Hughes bailed him out of a bases-loaded-no-out situation with a double play and a pop-up, then Pedro Alvarez and Corey Hart homered in the bottom of the inning to give the Pirates what turned out to be some much-needed insurance. Mark Melancon made the ninth inning a little terrifying, but managed to close out the win all the same.
I am exhausted (and sunburned) and so I’m having a little bit of trouble putting words together in a useful fashion right now, but I think that I can probably just leave it on the “perfect afternoon for baseball” bit. It’s hard to beat a 75 degree afternoon with the sun shining and a good Pirate team starting to round into form with a solid win over a red-hot Tiger team. Every day that goes by is putting that ugly Cincinnati series a little bit further behind us, and that’s certainly a good thing.
