First off, a bit of news: Chris Stewart’s disabled list stint is over, so he’s back with the Pirates and Tony Sanchez is headed back to Indianapolis. I strongly suspect that Sanchez will be back before long, but I suppose we’ll see. For now, there wasn’t much that Sanchez was going to be able to do to stay with the big league club. I suppose we’ll see how this goes from here.
The Pirates’ offense is just completely mired in a pit of quicksand and terribleness right now. They haven’t scored since the home opener. They haven’t drawn a walk since (wait a second can this be right?) last Saturday. They are hitting .207/.255/.338 as a team right now, which is a 15/15/13 split in the National League rankings. They’ve struck out 81 times and drawn 14 walks. They aren’t this bad, but they’ve been exceptionally tough to watch.
The good news is that they’re playing the Brewers this weekend, and the Brewers have been terrible so far in 2014. The bad news is that tonight they’re facing Jimmy Nelson, who absolutely dominated them last Saturday at Miller Park, to the tune of nine strikeouts over seven two-hit, shutout innings. The silver lining to be grasped is that he’s the last pitcher to walk a Pirate hitter. Vance Worley pitches tonight; he was not great against this same Brewer team in that same game. Baseball is obviously weird and so what happened last Saturday doesn’t have to happen again tonight, but this matchup doesn’t give me a great feeling.
Neil Walker is out of the lineup tonight for a regularly scheduled off-day (remember that Hurdle likes to give his guys off-days situated around the empty days in the schedule) and Sean Rodriguez is in his place. First pitch is at 7:05.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
