The good news is that the second phase of the AJ Burnett Experiment went quite well. He cruised through six innings, he struck out eight Tigers, he walked two, threw 69 of 111 pitches for strikes, and got three times as many groundouts as flyouts. He only ran into trouble in the seventh inning, when his control abandoned him a little bit. Still, it’s fair to say that through two starts he’s much more the 2012/2013 AJ Burnett than the 2014 edition the Phillies’ got, and that’s a good sign, even if the Pirates have lost both of his starts.
They lost tonight because they didn’t hit well enough, plain and simple. The Pirates have had a bit of a strikeout bug early this year, but they didn’t strike out a ton against Shane Greene. Instead, they hit into a ton of groundouts, and the balls that they did hit sharply didn’t fall. They only managed three hits, and that’s not going to win many baseball games. We could talk about how disappointing it is to see them only muster three hits against Shane Greene, but it’s early in the season, there’s probably a bit of a Home Opener Hangover, etc. etc. So long as one data point doesn’t become a pattern …
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