Let’s begin with baseball. Charlie Morton was excellent today, which is really important news for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Prior to AJ Burnett’s recent struggles, Morton had easily been the Pirates’ worst pitcher. His last seven starts were disastrous: 37 innings, 45 hits, 30 runs, 26 strikeouts, 16 walks, 6 homers, 6 HBPs, and a .935 OPS against.
After a blow-out loss and two five-inning starts, the Pirates really needed anything from Morton today, and he gave them a really solid start. He shut out the Reds for seven innings, scattered five hits, struck out seven, and got nine ground outs. He was what you’d expect from Charlie Morton, in other words, and I know this Reds team isn’t a great team and they’re dealing with a trade deadline that cut their pitching staff up, but when you’ve been pitching as poorly as Morton has, any strong start is a great sign.
The Pirates didn’t do as well against Keyvius Sampson as anyone would’ve liked, but Starling Marte’s two-run double and Neil Walker’s homer were more than enough for Morton. A split feels like a bad result in this series, but the Pirates went 4-2 on this six-game road trip, and given the Pirates’ record on the road this year (26-26 after today’s win). A week ago, I think we all would’ve said that a 4-2 trip before coming home to play the Cubs and Dodgers would be a strong result, and the Pirates managed to get it, despite AJ Burnett’s arm troubles and Gerrit Cole’s continuing Reds troubles*.
Of course, this game ended up being less about baseball and more about the extracurricular activities between the Pirates and Reds in the late innings of this game. I’ve talked about this in the past, and I made a lot of people mad on Twitter this afternoon, but I hate this stuff. I hate the idea that the Pirates need to throw at hitters to “protect” Andrew McCutchen, and I hate the idea that one HBP leads to another HBP. I think all of it is stupid and counter-productive, and I most of all hate the narrative that the Pirates are somehow innocent bystanders forced to defend themselves by the honor code of baseball when incidents like this take place.
Last night in the eighth inning, Joe Blanton hit Marlon Byrd between the numbers. Byrd did not react well to it, and clearly had words for Blanton. The Pirate TV broadcast team last night basically took the tone of, “Oh my goodness, it’s so awful that Joe Blanton accidentally hit Marlon Byrd, and now Aroldis Chapman is going to take the mound and hit a Pirate intentionally in return.” I have no idea of Blanton hit Byrd on purpose; the situation obviously didn’t warrant it, but Blanton and Byrd have played a lot of years in a lot of places, and it’s possible bad blood exists. It certainly wasn’t a breaking pitch that barely caught Byrd on the elbow or anything; it was a fastball that rode in and hit Byrd hard.
Aroldis Chapman didn’t retaliate last night, and then nothing happened until Pedro Villareal hit Andrew McCutchen in the eighth inning in almost the same spot that Byrd got hit last night. The immediate reaction, from McCutchen, from the Pirates, from Wehner, from Tim Neverett, from most Pirate fans, was that the hit was intentional, and that it was a chickenshit move for the Reds to wait until the end of the next game to repay the Pirates for an unintentional HBP from the night before. I think it’s a little ridiculous to imply intent in this situation: there was a runner on and two outs, and the red hot Jung Ho Kang was sitting on deck in a game that was by no means over at 3-0. If Villareal was on strict instructions to hit McCutchen, why wouldn’t they do it when he lead off the sixth inning instead?
When McCutchen got hit, Neverett and Wehner repeated over and over again that McCutchen was the National League leading 60th Pirate to be hit by a pitch this year. They never once mentioned that (at that point in time) the Pirates had hit an NL-leading 53 batters of their own. The Pirates have explicitly acknowledged in the past that they understand that by throwing inside a lot, that they’re going to hit batters, and that by hitting batters, they risk opponents wanting to retaliate. In fact, when something like Blanton hitting Byrd happens, that’s exactly how it’s treated by everyone around the Pirates: “Oh, the Pirates pitch inside, so they hit people.” The thing is, pitchers pitch McCutchen inside, too: he doesn’t hit balls off the plate nearly as well as he does stuff over the plate or inside of the plate, so pitchers try to brush him back to move him a bit off the plate and further exploit that advantage on the outside part of the plate. Other teams pitch to McCutchen exactly how the Pirates would pitch to him, in other words.
And so the end result of this is that Tony Watson obviously threw at and hit Brandon Phillips with one out in the eighth, which started a long benches clearing something in which a few players got kicked out, both benches got warned, and then when Mark Melancon unintentionally hit some random Red in the ninth, he got tossed.
My whole problem with this is that I fail to see what it accomplishes for the Pirates. I don’t think you can say with 100% certainty that Villareal threw at McCutchen in the eighth, and I’m 100% positive that Watson throwing at Phillips isn’t going to prevent someone from throwing at McCutchen again, because Marlon Byrd will not be the last hitter buzzed by an inside fastball from a Pirate pitcher this year, and because doing things like throwing at Phillips creates the impression that the Pirates’ HBPs are intentional even when the great majority of them are not. So here’s what throwing at someone accomplishes from the Pirates perspective: you risk Tony Watson getting ejected and/or suspended, you risk an important player getting injured in the ensuing slap-fight, you create the situation that allows Melancon to be tossed from a close game with the tying run on base in the ninth inning, you risk injuring Brandon Phillips (this seems like a stupid point for a Pirate fan to make, but frankly, it’s a dumb way for any player to get hurt, even Brandon Phillips, and every Pirate fan knows this because we watched it happen last year), and you’ve created two in-game disruptions that give the Reds a chance to win a game they otherwise had more or less no shot at winning. It’s petty, it doesn’t accomplish what anyone thinks it accomplishes, and pretty much every possible outcome from Watson throwing at Phillips favors the Reds.
I suspect that all of this has more to do with the Reds than much of anything else: off the top of my head, both the Braves and Tigers have had some issues with the way the Pirates pitch inside this year, and the Pirates have more or less brushed off any concerns without anything serious happening on the field. I don’t really care if “defending” people is “part of baseball.” I think it’s dumb and counterproductive, and I’d like the Pirates to be above it. I think they usually are, but they weren’t today. To pretend like they were the victims in this little exchange when three Reds got hit compared to one Pirate is ridiculous.
Back to baseball. The Pirates next 12 games are against the Cubs, Dodgers, Cardinals, and Mets, in that order. If the Pirates are going to end August with any chance to win the NL Central or without a ton of drama in the Wild Card race, they’re going to have to play very good baseball in these next 12 games. It’s been a long while since they’ve had an extended stretch like this. I’m excited to see it, even if I’m a bit nervous with how the Pirates pitchers have looked since the break.
*I straight up cannot figure out what Cole’s deal with the Reds is. It seems to me that the Reds guess right against Cole a lot, which makes me suspect that there’s more to it than the Reds simply matching up well against Cole. Brandon Phillips’ little “I didn’t see it” gesture after an ugly strikeout in the first last night could’ve meant he was fooled by the pitch, or that he got a pitch he wasn’t expecting. I would guess that the Reds have the Pirates’ signs, except that they had trouble with Arquimedes Caminero after Cole last night and Charlie Morton steamrolled them today. That means that my best guess is that maybe Cole is tipping his pitches and the Reds are onto him because they see him as often as anyone else. I think this is something worth looking into for the Pirates.
Photo credit: Andy Lyons, Getty Images
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