Three games into the Rockies series, the Pirates’ biggest problem has been their offense. They’ve gotten some runners on base and Jose Tabata is killing the ball, but they’re consistently one or two hits short of breaking an inning wide open and as a result, they’ve only scored eight runs in four games. They face Jhoulys Chacin today, who both strikes out a ton of hitters and walks a ton of hitters (in 28 games/21 starts last year he struck out a batter an inning and walked 4.0 per nine), which means that the Pirates’ ability to not swing like crazy and work the count a bit is important today.
James McDonald goes for the Bucs, hoping to build on a first start that was decent given the circumstances (all the missed time with the strained side) but needs to be better than four walks in 4 2/3 innings. Hopefully he’ll be a little more efficient and have a bit of a longer leash now that he’s got one start behind him. The Pirates should at least be able to muster a bullpen behind him if he cant’ pitch deep into the game after Charlie Morton gave the Bucs seven innings last night and Clint Hurdle went to Dan McCutchen and Kevin Correia (people were asking about Correia pitching out of the pen but with the off-day on Monday I’m guessing Saturday was likely his scheduled day to throw, so there’s not really anything wrong with him working an inning out of the bullpen; Joe Maddon does this in Tampa did this a few times last year with Garza and I think Shields) after Jose Veras imploded.
First pitch this afternoon is at 1:35.
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