Victor Martinez was displeased with being hit by Gerrit Cole last night (from MLive.com):
“I mean, I have no respect for no one on that team, including Cole and their coaching staff,” said Martinez, who was adamant that Cole intentionally hit him.
This is approximately the 97th time in the last three years that the Pirates have found themselves in the middle of this sort of thing and the second time in just a handful of days after last weekend’s incident with the Braves. I know that we Pirate fans like to think that it’s ridiculous that so many teams throw at the Pirates and that we all have this perception that Andrew McCutchen is under a clear and present danger from every pitching staff in the league, but this is a bed of the Pirates’ own making. They lead the NL in HBP by a wide margin last year and by a smaller margin in 2013, and they’re close to the top this year.
This is not to say that I think the Pirates throw at people, because I don’t think that. What the Pirates do do is pitch inside a lot. Given various off-hand comments from coaches and players and some ideas in Travis Sawchik’s Big Data Baseball (which, forgive me, I’m only about halfway through at the moment), the basic concept at play here is that the Pirates think that by having their pitchers establish command of the inside of the plate, they can coax hitters towards a particular reaction and thus a particular result. The byproduct of this is that sometimes, they’re going to hit opponents with pitches.
There’s one other factor at play here. Both this incident with the Tigers and the incident with the Braves didn’t actually start with a Pirate pitcher hitting an opponent; they started with Starling Marte being hit by the opposing pitcher. Last night Verlander hit Marte in the fourth inning, which came right before the HBP that Martinez is so upset about. The Braves’ frustration began in the Pirates’ first series with them this year, when Gerrit Cole hit three Braves after Marte was hit by a pitch early in the game. The logic of the opponents, I suspect, is that Marte is one of the Pirates’ best players and so when he’s hit by a pitch, the Pirates retaliate. The problem with this is that Marte is constantly getting hit by pitches. He was second in the NL in HBP in 2013, third last year, and is eighth this year. If the Pirates retaliated every time he got hit by a pitch, they’d be retaliating once a week.
I’m obviously biased on this topic, but my gut suspicion is that the Pirates aren’t intentionally head-hunting. They’re pitching inside, which results in people getting hit more often than other teams hit people, and occasionally that philosophy overlaps with Starling Marte’s penchant for getting hit by pitches. When that happens, these sorts of situations occur.
I’m sure Tigers fans and Braves fans will agree with me 100% on this issue.
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