This is admittedly overly-reductive and entirely unfair, but in a way, Felix Pie's Pirate debut was actually decided by Felix Pie before any of his Pirate teammates — the teammates that have made up the Pirates entirely without him this year prior to tonight — contributed anything to this game at all. Pie lead off the game with an infield single (punctuated with a needless head-first dive into first base, which is the one thing in baseball that might set me off more than bunting runners over in front of Andrew McCutchen), then got caught stealing second. The first inning ended with the bases full of Pirates, but no runs scored. The Pirates lost the game 2-1.
Of course, that's mostly just me being unnecessarily whimsical about the weird pecularities of baseball and the universe. The Pirates lost tonight because after putting four runners on base against Ian Kennedy in the first inning, they only managed three more total in the next six innings. Gerrit Cole had a strange night; the Padres never seemed to hit anything hard, but everything seemed to find holes against him. He ended up giving up ten hits but minimizing their effect with only two runs crossing. That was probably due to his five strikeouts, eight groundouts, and only three flyouts. He wasn't great, but he was effective enough that he certainly didn't deserve the loss the offense saddled him with.
If we're being honest, this game is the way that I dreaded that the entire series in Petco would go this week. I would've liked to see a sweep, especially because the Cardinals and Reds both won today, but taking two out of three and maintaining the status quo in the division is just fine for a mid-August road trip. That's because the current status quo has the Pirates in first place.
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