Andrew McCutchen has played 158, 157, and 157 games in each of the last three years, respectively. This means that there will be a handful of nights every year where he doesn’t play. It would seem odd for one of those games to be on a Saturday night at PNC Park against a division rival in a stretch where the Pirates have a ton of off-days and are just starting to play decent baseball, so I’m going to go ahead and guess that he’s not quite 100% tonight.
The Cardinals will send Lance Lynn to the mound tonight, so hopefully the Pirates won’t need McCutchen to put some runs on the board. The Bucs have seen plenty of Lynn and got to him quite a few times last year (they scored 17 runs in 30 regular season innings against him, then teed off on him in the NLDS). They’ll probably need to do that tonight: Edinson Volquez goes to the mound for the Bucs and he hasn’t been terribly impressive lately.
First pitch tonight is at 7:05.
