Game 70: Pirates 7 Reds 6

If I had to venture a guess, I’d assume that teams that score seven runs in an inning have a pretty good winning percentage throughout the history of baseball.

I could leave the recap there, since that’s about all the substance I have to offer due to my focus being mostly on my softball league’s championship this week (look, we lost tonight, but we won the winner’s bracket so we get another shot; I don’t want to talk about it, OK?). That’s not entirely true, though, so I’m going to turn to the long-standing crutch of the tired/lazy blogger: the bullet point.

• In the past I like to note when the broadcasting crew is directly critical of a player, as I think that it tends to indicate that the broadcasting crew has been told that they’re allowed to be directly critical (I call this the Brandon Inge Rule, since no one said a bad thing about Inge all year in 2013 until he was 72 hours away from DFA). Greg Brown very explicitly mentioned Pedro Alvarez’s bad defense in the first inning tonight. I’m not saying that I’m positive about anything as it relates to Alvarez, as his strikeout and walk numbers look good and a Hot Pedro Alvarez Week would change his triple slash line in a hurry.  All I’m saying is that it’s worth putting in your notebook that his defense is a big enough problem that it can be mentioned on the broadcast.
• This was my train of thought after the top of the first: “Well, you’d hope that a real contender wouldn’t be down and out with a three-run deficit in the first against a bad team.”
• Francisco Cervelli. Man. Even if you’re pretty much all-in on whatever decisions this front office makes as it relates to catchers (which I am), you have to admit that Cervelli’s been a pleasant surprise.
• Don’t let it be said that I’m not willing to admit that I could’ve been wrong about Mark Melancon. He threw some nasty cutters in his last two saves against the White Sox that were impossible to ignore, and he struck out the side in the ninth tonight. That’s six strikeouts in his last three appearances. The borderline unhittable heavy cutter is back. He is much closer to the 2013/2014 version of Mark Melancon right now than he is to whatever he was at the beginning of the year this year.

It’s tempting to brush this win off as a game the Pirates “should have won,” but the Pirates came into tonight on a three-game losing streak and with a 13-17 record against the NL Central. When you combine that with an early 4-0 deficit, I think that makes this a nice win. As I said before the game: starting the series with a win in a Jeff Locke start with Gerrit Cole and AJ Burnett waiting in the wings is always a nice thing to do. At the very least, it puts some distance between the Pirates and whatever it was that happened in that Nationals series.

Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images