I am in the depths of paper/thesis writing right now and it’s consuming much of my time/thought processes. That makes it tough to clear my head several times a day to sit down and write about baseball. Let’s try something new: instead of doing a preview post and a recap post each night, I’m going to put one daily post up in the late morning/early afternoon with thoughts on the previous night’s game, a brief preview of the upcoming game, some links to share, and whatever else is on my mind. Basically, a WHYGAVS newsletter. I don’t really want to do the blog this way, but it seems like a solid compromise while I’m busy trying to get myself out of grad school.
I think that pretty much all discussion of yesterday’s double-header for Pirate fans starts and ends with Gerrit Cole. Besides his rough seventh inning, which was exacerbated by a few things out of his control, he looked dominant against the Cubs. He was a little uneven early on, giving up a run in the first and putting a few runners on base in the second and third, but he set down the side in order in the fourth, fifth, and sixth, he struck out eight total and five of those eight strikeouts came in those three dominant middle innings. He used his slider and curveball to generate a ton of whiffs (nine with the slider on 17 swins, four with the curveball on four swings (!!)), and perhaps most notably, of the 37 breaking balls he threw (23 sliders, 14 curves), only three were put into play. I’ve been tracking the vertical movement of his slider quite a bit lately, as my concern was that his semi-swoon in August was maybe due to a slider that lost some bite. His slider didn’t have a ton of that vertical movement yesterday, either, but that didn’t matter. It’s entirely possible I’m asking the wrong questions here, as lately the whiffs-per-swing on his curveball have been through the roof. Since his curve and slider are pretty similar pitches, it’s possible that rather than seeing Cole’s slider lose his bite, his mini-slump was due to the evolution of his breaking pitches.
Whatever the case, he was excellent for six innings yesterday and could’ve escaped the seventh without harm with a little bit more luck (though obviously I don’t want to absolve him of blame for Tommy La Stella’s RBI double). This is the Gerrit Cole the Pirates need during the playoffs, obviously, and it was nice to see him out on the mound yesterday, generating a ton of whiffs against the Pirates’ potential wild card opponent.
Of course, the Pirates didn’t escape that seventh inning unscathed, mostly due to Joakim Soria’s two run-scoring wild pitches. In 18 2/3 innings as a Pirate, Soria’s got a nice 2.89 ERA and a great 2.45 FIP due to a strong K/BB ratio (2.43) and the lack of any home runs allowed. He’s thrown five wild pitches, though, and two of the three leads he’s given up as a Pirate have involved wild pitches. In his entire career, Soria has never had more than three wild pitches in a season. He had two in an inning yesterday and has five in 18 2/3 innings as a Pirate. I don’t know how to explain this: it could just be incredible bad luck, or it could have some sort of underlying cause. I’m almost always nervous when he’s on the mound, though, and the wild pitches are why.
I don’t have a ton to say about the nightcap except for that we occasionally tend to lose sight of the fact that sometimes your team falls victim to great individual performances, and sometimes as a result, you lose because of them and not because of anything your favorite team did. Jon Lester hasn’t had a great season in Chicago, but he’s still Jon Lester and he was dealing last night. Perhaps that game turns out differently if it’s not the second part of a double-header, and Clint Hurdle’s able to use a slightly different lineup. Maybe not, though. Lester cruised through a complete game on 111 pitches, even with nine strikeouts.
As I said before the double-header, I wanted a sweep pretty badly yesterday, but the split was hardly disastrous. It keeps the Pirates four up on the Cubs, and it held the Pirates at three behind the Cardinals. That gives the Pirates some much needed leeway heading into tonight’s game against Jake Arrieta, though I’d like to see the Pirates stay within three of the Cardinals right now and would be nervous to see them fall further back than that.
Tonight’s matchup is the scary one for the Pirates. Staring with his June 21st shutout against the Twins, Arrieta’s on a 16-start tear: 13-1 with a 1.00 ERA, 115 strikeouts, 25 walks, two homers and only 64 hits allowed in 117 innings. Opponents have a .441 OPS against him. He started once against the Pirates in that stretch, holding them to two hits in seven shutout innings. He’s vaulted himself into the middle of a Cy Young conversation that previously seemed to only include Zack Greinke and Clayton Kershaw. AJ Burnett, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly at his sharpest against the Brewers in his first start back from his flexor-tendon injury, though at least it looks like his velocity has recovered from the ugly dip it took in the start prior to the injury. If you remember Jason Grilli’s recovery from the same injury two years ago, it took Grilli a while to find his groove after returning, so hopefully just the act of pitching last week will make Burnett better in this start than he was in the last one.
Let’s look at tonight’s game like this: if the Pirates can rally around their team-leader/veteran and defeat Major League Baseball’s hottest pitcher, it’ll be one hell of a win for this team. If they lose, well, they won’t be hugely worse off than they are right now. And it’s what everyone’s expecting right now, right? First pitch is 7:05.
Photo by Jared Wickerham/Getty Images
