Here is the reality of the Pirates current situation: they are badly short-handed. They probably won’t be this way for longer than a week, but they’re not in a situation with a ton of room for error and it’s happening against two of the best teams in baseball. That sucks, but it’s how pennant races work.
One way to get through a period like this is to have the unexpected bit players step up. That was the story with Travis Ishikawa last night, but it was really only part of the story. The reason Ishikawa was able to drive so many runs in was because the uninjured regulars in the Pirates’ lineup also had a ton of hits to provide the opportunity to come through.
The real way to get through a bunch of injuries and a thin roster is to have your best players step up. The Pirates don’t have Josh Harrison or Jordy Mercer right now, but they do have Andrew McCutchen and Starling Marte and Neil Walker and they have their full pitching staff, and on some nights, those are all players that can carry the Pirates to wins. Counting on the Cardinals to slow down for you while you sort out injury problems is a bad strategy: having your best players step up and help you pull out wins is a better one.
Gerrit Cole did his part, tonight. The Royals are a good offensive team that is ridiculously hard to strike out and Cole bulldozed his way through 7 1/3 innings, holding the Royals to three hits and striking out six. It was one of his best starts of the year. With one out in the eighth, Omar Infante hit a ball directly into the shift and right at Neil Walker. Walker went down on one knee to stop the ball, and had hit go right through his legs and into the outfield. Alex Rios followed that up with a single to second that McCutchen slightly misplayed, then panic-lollipopped a throw to third base, way off line with the cut off man, allowing Rios to reach second. Suddenly instead of having a runner on first with two outs, or runners at the corner with one out but a double play intact for a great ground ball pitcher, the Pirates were facing second and third with two outs wholly because two of their most veteran players simply failed to baseball in a reasonably routine fashion. To cap off the entire farce, Jarrod Dyson singled to Gregory Polanco in right field, and Polanco just flat-out dropped the ball while trying to throw it home to prevent Rios from scoring. Two runs that the Royals had no business scoring, handed to them by the Pirates.
Actually, I should choose my words more carefully. I think the farce was probably capped off with Starling Marte getting thrown out by a mile at the plate with nobody out in the top of the ninth, but I had turned the game off by then. The Pirates were short-handed tonight against a good team, they got a fantastic performance by their ace, the Royals starter left the game in the second inning, and the Pirates’ regular players straight-up handed the game to the Royals by not making plays any reasonable baseball player should be expected to make. Context is hard to maintain throughout the season, but this is probably the most maddening loss of the year.
The Cardinals won tonight. They’ve doubled their division lead to five games in the five days since the All-Star Break has ended. That is not good.
*There was also a weird play in the second inning when Starling Marte appeared to homer, but the play was ruled a double by a ground rule that was poorly explained by pretty much everyone. The part in the fence in front of the railing in left field is considered to be in play, which means that once it touches that part of the fence it can’t be a home run. It was the right call, but it’s a ground rule that almost certainly wasn’t written with balls bouncing like Marte’s did in mind.
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