This offense is really hard to watch right now. The Pirates’ 6-8 hitters today were Brandon Wood, Ronny Cedeno, and Dusty Brown and Matt Diaz batted second. Toss a pitcher in there and consider that Neil Walker and Lyle Overbay were both in the lineup against lefty Chris Capuano and that leaves two Major League hitters in the lineup; Jose Tabata and Andrew McCutchen. That’s just a brutal lineup that any pitcher would have to be perfect to survive with.
Kevin Correia was perfect into the fifth inning, though, and he cruised into the seventh inning, when he allowed his first run on a weird play that was made even tougher to understand because the Pirates’ announcers couldn’t make head or tail of the umpire’s ruling. If you missed the play, or are still wondering about it, Jason Bay hit a flyball to Andrew McCutchen in center field for the seventh inning’s second out. Daniel Murphy tagged from third and scored, but Angel Pagan, who was on first, had rounded second and failed to retouch before heading back to first. The Pirates appealed and got the out at second, but the run still counted because while the appeal play isn’t a tag, it’s not a force out, either and only force plays negate runs scored before the out was recorded (this is sort of spelled out but not really in Rule 7.12, which says that only appeal plays that result in force outs negate runs previously scored, which implies that appeals that don’t result in force outs, like the one in the seventh inning, don’t).
Correia’s afternoon probably should’ve ended there, but he came back out for the eighth and immediately got into trouble. Neither Chris Resop nor Dan McCutchen could get him out of that trouble, either, and the quickly evaporating Dan McCutchen allowed two homers in the ninth and suddenly a close game turned into a 7-0 blowout.
Just a brutal afternoon.
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