After laying an egg last night, the Pirates get to face the beard-in-human-form that’s haunted their dreams since last October tonight. This is about as unpleasant as a matchup gets; lose on Monday with your ace on the mound, then send Jon Niese out to face Jake Arrieta in the second game of a series.
Arrieta has more or less picked up where he left off last year, although I suppose we can draw some hope from the fact that he’s walked eight people in his last two starts, one of which was a no-hitter against the hapless Reds and the other of which was a five-inning start against the Brewers. He’s also only allowed 18 hits in 36 innings this year, which both seems terrifying and unsustainable.
What we can say is this: Arrieta will, at some point, lose a baseball game in 2016 and tonight he’s facing a Pirate lineup that is both one of the best non-Cub lineups in the National League and familiar with Arrieta (and yes, you can say that they had no luck against Arrieta in the Wild Card Game, but I’ll continue to cling to the way the Pirates smoked balls off of him that found their way directly into gloves over that game’s final four innings as a symbol of What Could Have Been). If he’s going to lose, it might as well be to the Pirates, right?
That’s probably wishful thinking. Chances are quite good the Pirates will need a number of runs tonight to keep up with what the Cubs, as Niese hasn’t been terribly impressive lately. First pitch tonight is at 7:05.
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