On Monday, Joe Posnanski took a fascinating look at the Braves, their record in games in which they’d scored five runs or more, and how teams that do exceptionally well in those sorts of situations fare over the course of the season. As of that writing, the Braves were 31-0 in games where they scored 5+ runs.
Tonight, the Pirates reached that plateau for just the 18th time this season and racked up their fifth loss. The Pirates now actually have a losing record (3-4) in games in which they score exactly five runs. The Pirates offense is terrible and their pitching isn’t good enough to take advantage when it isn’t. Jeff Karstens has had a nice enough season to this point, but he’s not capable of pitching more than five innings. That leaves a long stretch to be covered by the bullpen. Tonight, Evan Meek gave up his first earned runs in June thanks in large part to Lastings Milledge’s 97th1 missed diving catch of the season2 and JR committed the “it’s a tie game and we’re the road team, so I have to use a crappy reliever who’s going to be back in Triple-A in two days in the ninth inning against the hottest team in baseball because we might get a lead in the tenth and then I can use Octavio Dotel to close down the save” fallacy that baseball managers have perfected against all logic and sensibility in the ninth. That resulted in Steven Jackson pitching against the heart of the Rangers order. If you missed it, it ended how you’d expect it to end.
On the brigher side, if there is one at this point, the Pirates did manage to rack up 14 hits tonight, but they also got caught stealing twice and hit into twp double plays. They had four of those hits in the four-run first inning, so after that they had ten hits that only produced one run. And they only drew one walk all night (also in the first inning) to go with nine strikeouts. Hardly an offensive performance for the ages, though as mentioned above, scoring five runs isn’t a bad night for this Pirate team ever.
This was certainly one of the more frustrating losses of the year, which I think really says something. Not something good, either.
1- OK, that’s probably an exaggeration. Probably
2- Why do some National League managers fail to understand how to use the DH? There’s no reason for Ryan Church to be DHing when Lastings Milledge is in the field, just like there was no reason for Garrett Jones to be DHing when Ryan Doumit was at first base. This isn’t a hard concept; pick 10 guys, give the nine best fielders gloves. And yet, I feel like at least half of the NL teams just stick a bench guy into their regular lineup regardless of fielding ability and just move on with the games. This flawed strategy is in no way specific to John Russell. No wonder this league gets slaughtered in interleague play every year.
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