Wins don’t come easily for the Pirates at Busch Stadium, and so it’s hard to feel any way but frustrated after the Pirates dropped the first game of this three-game set there in what felt like an avoidable fashion on Tuesday night. The short version is that the Pirates took a 3-1 lead on the Cardinals thanks to a first-inning Starling Marte double, a third inning Gregory Polanco triple, and a fourth inning Pedro Alvarez homer. They then watched that lead disappear and turn into a 4-3 deficit in fifth inning because Jeff Locke can’t throw strikes and was left to face the top and middle of the Cardinal lineup for a third time.
The long version of this game is this: how the hell is this team going to keep winning games at a reasonable enough clip with this starting rotation? That’s a little alarmist, of course, because they’ve been winning games just fine lately thanks to their offense bludgeoning everyone into submission, but the question about pulling Locke in the fifth doesn’t really just deal with this game. It seems easy to say, “Hurdle should have pulled Locke,” because Locke was clearly out of gas when he walked Kolten Wong and Jhonny Peralta to start the fifth. He’d been dancing through rain drops the whole game, after all. But how often can you go to your bullpen in the fifth inning? Charlie Morton only went five innings on Sunday, Francisco Liriano didn’t throw a pitch in the fourth on Saturday, and suddenly you’re looking at the calendar realizing that only one Pirate starter has pitched seven innings in a start in all of August and that was Charlie Morton on August 2nd and only one other one has even made it six innings (Gerrit Cole on Friday).
What Hurdle did with Locke tonight was what he did with Morton on Sunday: try like hell to get him through five innings because the bullpen can’t pitch 4+ innings every night. The offense bailed Morton (and Hurdle) out on Sunday, but they couldn’t do it against Carlos Martinez, who settled into a groove after getting hit pretty hard early on in this game. And can you blame Hurdle for looking down the road here? As urgent as this series in St. Louis feels, it’s not a best-of-five and there’s a lot of baseball waiting on the other side of it. Gerrit Cole’s thrown 11 innings in his last two starts and has surpassed last year’s inning total, while Francisco Liriano’s now had two ailments that have taken him out of second half starts, either partially or completely. Their two starters after that are listed as “TBD,” but will probably be Charlie Morton and JA Happ in one order or another. Neither of them should be counted on to last more than five innings in any circumstance. And so of course Hurdle could’ve used Jared Hughes in the fifth, Caminero in the sixth, Soria in the seventh, Watson in the eighth, and Melancon in the ninth, but that uses each of your five best relievers in the first game of the series. On top of that, it’s entirely possible that the Pirates only have one off day left this season thanks to that rain-out agains the Cubs, and that’s not until August 31st.
Which is to say this: it sucked watching Jeff Locke fail to get out of the fifth inning, blow a two-run lead, and saddle the Pirates with a loss in a winnable game that dropped them six games out of first place. But the bad part wasn’t just this game itself, it was realizing why Hurdle’s been pushing so hard to get his starters five innings these last couple of days and wondering how often this might happen between now and the end of the season if the starting rotation can’t get some kind of traction soon.
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