Before the game, I wrote this:
Last year, the Pirates were 8-11 against the Cardinals. They lost six of those games by one run (two of those were walkoffs), and another one on a walkoff two-run home run. The Pirates lost the NL Central by two games last year. There are plenty of things that happen in a 162-game season to separate two teams out from each other, but when the 2014 season ended the very top of my “Reasons the Pirates didn’t win the division this year” list was “INFURIATING LOSSES TO THE CARDINALS.”
During the game, the Pirates scored a run on an AJ Burnett single in the sixth inning, then Gregory Polanco walked to load the bases with no outs. Josh Harrison popped up, Andrew McCutchen struck out looking (there was some complaining about the third called strike both from fans and, weirdly enough, from reporters, but the PitchFX shows that while that pitch was awfully close it seems to have hit the corner — the first called strike in that at-bat was unequivocally bad, though) and Neil Walker struck out swinging. In the seventh, the bullpen (Arquimedes Caminero, Antonio Bastardo, and Jared Hughes) combined to blow the 1-0 lead. In the tenth, Rob Scahill gave up a second run*.
Wasting a seven strikeout, two-hit start from AJ Burnett, making three straight outs with the bases loaded without scoring a run, and losing in the tenth on a walkoff single: INFURIATING LOSS TO THE CARDINALS.
*It’s easy to be annoyed that Scahill was on the mound in the tenth and not Mark Melancon, but I don’t think that you can be simultaneously mad at Clint Hurdle for keeping Melancon pitching in high leverage situations and mad at Clint Hurdle for pitching Rob Scahill in a high-leverage situation over Mark Melancon. The manager only has so many tools. I guess he could’ve gone to Radhames Liz for the tenth, but my guess is he was using Scahill over Liz because he wanted to more or less empty the bullpen before going to a potential long reliever, which is fine.
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