I think that my dislike of really stupid baseball has been pretty well-established here. What else can you call sending a runner from third base on high pop-up to right field with one out when you’re down by three runs? It was a perfect flyball for Jayson Werth to make a throw home on and McCutchen was the Pirates’ fourth run when the Nationals had six. And yeah, McCutchen looked like he was safe, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable. I don’t know if it was McCutchen’s call to go on his on or if Nick Leyva had him tagging up to run, but it’s such a brainless play that lacks common sense and situational awareness that I can barely even think about the rest of the game.
What happened to put the Pirates behind was that Kevin Correia’s home run rate regressed back towards the mean. Over the course of his career, Correia generally allows home runs on about 10% of his flyballs. In his first four starts in 2011, his HR/FB rate was only 4.2%. That’s just two homers in 29 innings for a guy with a 41.1% groundball percentage. The funny thing is that Correia did get a ton of groundouts today. His problem was that of the few balls the Nats put into the air, two of them landed over the fence and one of those was a three-run homer.
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