To put it bluntly, this game was every stupid thing that I was afraid it was going to be. Gerrit Cole was phenomenal for the Pirates; he got into a little trouble in the first inning in part due to a Brandon Phillips bloop single, escaped the jam with only one run allowed, and then cruised through the next six innings without breaking a sweat. He was painting with 98 mph fastballs, he was putting every breaking ball and change-up where it needed to go, and the Reds had zero chance against him. In seven innings of work, he held the Reds to four hits (two after the first inning) he struck out 12 hitters, he walked none. In short, he gave the exact sort of performance you’d like to see in a game that had the whole season riding on it.
Instead, he gave the performance in a borderline-meaningless game against a pitcher that’s killed the Pirates all season long. Johnny Cueto was every bit as good as Cole was, limiting the Pirates to Neil Walker’s fourth inning home run. He struck out eight Pirates in eight innings, scattering the five non-homer hits he allowed and walking no one. In the seventh inning, the Pirate bullpen came into the game, blew the game*, and Cole’s performance was wasted.
Anyway, the good news of today is that Cole really does seem to be hitting his stride just in time for the playoffs. It’s hard to judge how well any of the Pirates’ pitchers are pitching right now because the Pirates haven’t played a good offense in a while, but Cole really did seem to be firing on all cylinders today. I suppose all we can do now is cross our fingers and hope that he actually gets a playoff start, since he was wasted today.
*Quick aside: Clint Hurdle managed to make the worst managerial decision in this game by starting Cole, which was an accomplishment because Bryan Price managed the eighth inning of this game like he’d never seen a baseball game before. Jason Bourgeois lead the inning off with a triple and stayed there when Josh Harrison speared a Zach Cozart line drive for the first out. That brought Johnny Cueto to the plate. Price refused to pinch-hit for Cueto for some reason, Tony Watson managed to somehow serve up a single to Cueto on a 3-2 pitch to lose the game, and then Price removed Cueto for a pinch-runner. I literally have no idea what Price was trying to accomplish; a pinch-hitter could have scored Bourgeois easily, which would’ve put Cueto in line for the win, which was obviously the goal. He basically managed himself into a corner, then Tony Watson managed to bail him out. The final fall-out of the whole thing was that not only did Cueto win the game with the hit, but he injured Chris Stewart on his back-swing. With Russell Martin already dealing with hamstring problems, well, that’s not good.
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