I’ll be honest: my hopes weren’t all that high for Charlie Morton’s return tonight. This could be apocryphal, but it’s always seemed in the past like Morton’s first start back from his many trips to the disabled list were often rough, even if the starts after it were fine. Tonight was classic Charlie Morton, though. Morton worked seven innings and recorded sixteen groundouts to go along with three strikeouts and no walks. The other two outs came via double plays: the Marlins literally had zero flyouts against Morton. They scored twice off of him mainly due to Giancarlo Stanton, who singled in Dee Gordon in the first and hit a ridiculous opposite field homer in the third. The rest was all Morton, though, and it was an encouraging place for his 2015 season to start.
On the flip side, the Pirates helped regress David Phelps’ 0.0 home run rate some: Francisco Cervelli hit an opposite-field three-run blast in the second, and Pedro Alvarez went oppo for a solo homer in the sixth. The Pirates didn’t show a ton of offense besides that, but they got the hits that they needed pretty much exactly when they needed them. In other words, it was a really nice continuation of the strong weekend the Pirates had against the Mets.
The Pirates have now won four in a row, and they’ve technically won five of seven, though there’s a sweep at the hands of the Twins mixed in there (here’s a lesson in arbitrary end-points: that win that the Pirates had against the Cubs last Sunday could be counted towards this recent “five-wins-in-seven-games” stretch, or it could be counted towards “six-losses-in-seven-games” stretch that ended with Friday’s win against the Mets). The first step was to start playing better: the next step will be to keep doing so.
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