Well, that was a fitting conclusion to a disastrous three-game sweep at the hands of the New York Mets. The Pirates followed a similar script on Wednesday, one they had stuck to throughout this series in Queens: a good outing from the starting pitcher is ruined by an anemic offense and a sieve-like bullpen. In this instance, it was Bailey Falter in the role of doomed starter: he went 5 innings, allowing 2 runs on 4 hits and a walk with 4 strikeouts. It was a good outing, but not good enough to overcome the fact that for the second day in a row the offense could only manage a single run; Pirate ..read more

All the conversation surrounding this game has been about Derek Shelton and his handling of Jared Jones, so let’s address that first. Jones was excellent to start the game; through 5 innings he was practically untouchable, striking out 7 Mets with no walks and the only baserunner coming on double in the 2nd that just evaded the reach of Bryan Reynolds. By the end of the 5th inning, Jones had retired 12 hitters in a row and appeared to have the New York lineup completely under his boot heel. The offense wasn’t able to get much going against former Pirate José Quintana, but Reynolds’ RBI single ..read more

It was strange to see people treating Monday night’s game like a bad loss. I can understand this from Pirate fans to an extent, but even the Sportsnet broadcast was acting like the Bucs had suffered some brutal blow in falling to New York in the late innings. You know what was a bad loss? Last Monday, when David Bednar blew a 2-run lead in the 9th inning and spoiled Martín Pérez’s excellent start. What happened on Monday was just a loss. Pérez pitched okay against the Mets but not great; he squandered the 3-0 lead the offense had handed him in the 6th on several singles and a bases-loaded walk ..read more

Games like Sunday’s are an important reminder that the season is still young and there is plenty of baseball that remains to be played. It’s why I’m hesitant to scream from the mountaintops that THE PIRATES ARE A GOOD TEAM despite their promising early results because we all saw what happened after the Bucs got off to a hot start last April, and the older fans (as in, older than 20) remember those Bucco teams of 2011 and 2012 who showed promise deep into the summer but fell apart in the final two months. But I’m not here to remind you that the season is barely two weeks old in order to be a pe ..read more

There was a lot of bellyaching on Twitter about the Pirates’ offensive approach on Saturday and really, throughout this series in Philadelphia. This is somewhat understandable because the Bucs haven’t scored a ton of runs this weekend, and they’ve struck out a lot: 10 times on Saturday, 8 times on Friday, and a brutal 14 times on Thursday. Watching your team strike out is never fun, but what has made these at-bats especially frustrating is that many of them were of the backwards K variety. On Saturday, the Pirates struck out looking several times with runners in scoring position, which is the ..read more

As I wrote after the last time David Bednar pitched, our opinion on whether a manager made the right call or the wrong one is almost always based on the result of that decision. If a pinch hitter comes through or a reliever gets the out he was brought in to obtain, then the manager is a genius. If that pinch hitter grounds into a double play or the reliever gives up a run, then the manager is an incompetent boob who couldn’t see why his decision was so obviously destined to fail. Derek Shelton announced on Thursday that if the Pirates had a save situation that night, Bednar would pitch. I can ..read more

Last weekend, I wrote that one of the worst things about following a rebuilding team is that you could never really enjoy a player’s performance in the moment; if a pitcher had a great game or a hitter had a good night at the plate, it only mattered inasmuch as he could continue to do so in the future. Of course, there is also an upside to watching such teams: you don’t really care if a great performance is wasted. The Pirates wasted a pretty great performance from Jared Jones on Thursday, falling to 9-4 on the season and failing to wash the bad taste from the mouth of every Pirate fan that ha ..read more

Tuesday’s game really drove something home for me: I’m glad I no longer try to pre-write these recaps. At times over the past few years, I attempted to have these sort of posts ready to be published within minutes after the final out was recorded. I stopped doing this because I’m rarely free to write during games these days, and because it is a tremendous waste of time and effort to write up an entire blog post only to have to delete everything because of some late development. At various times on Tuesday, I thought this recap would focus on Martin Pérez’s excellent start to the season, or wha ..read more

For his first few starts of the season, Pirate fans have been wondering how Mitch Keller could get back to being the old Mitch Keller — that is, the Mitch Keller of late 2022 and early 2023, the guy who earned the $77 million extension the Pirates gave him in February. In the 1st inning of Monday’s game, though, Keller looked like the old, old Mitch Keller — the guy who labored through 2021, spraying the baseball toward the general direction of home plate and hoping for the best. Mitch picked up 2 strikeouts but walked 2, and Detroit took an early lead on a single lined to left by Colt Keith ..read more

Good teams take advantage of mistakes. The Orioles didn’t make many mistakes this weekend; they excelled on the basepaths, they executed their pitching strategy, and they made several sparkling defense plays around the diamond. But they eventually cracked on Sunday due to a couple of throwing errors, and the Bucs were able to turn those miscues into a win and a series victory over a strong Baltimore club. For most of Sunday’s game, it looked like the Bucs would be paying for their own mistakes. Marco Gonzales made his second start of the season and looked even better facing Baltimore’s vaunted ..read more