Can the Pittsburgh Pirates keep it rolling?
Welcome to another edition of Pittsburgh Pirates Predictions, in which we make predictions about five Pirate performances in the upcoming week. We also take a look back at the previous week’s predictions to see how each panned out.
Last week (Monday, June 13 through Sunday, June 20), the Pirates had a disappointing series with the Giants and three solid wins against the Dodgers. The latest was rookie Chad Kuhl’s improbable Sunday night win against Clayton Kershaw. Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said “You can’t write that story before the game. You wouldn’t have that in there anywhere and it plays itself out on the national stage.”
Anywhere, that is, except at Pirates Breakdown! In last week’s Pirates Prediction Machine, we predicted this scenario. Here is the excerpt from last week’s article.
The Pirates will beat Clayton Kershaw. Seriously? OK, so technically, they might not score any runs off Kershaw, but they will win the game by driving his pitch count up and getting to the L.A. Bullpen. This is a risky prediction because we don’t really know who will start for the Pirates. Nicasio is scheduled but it could just as easily be a AAA call-up. If the Pirates beat Clayton Kershaw with say, Chad Kuhl on the mound, then we should get triple credit for this prediction!
Triple credit would be nice because we didn’t do so well in our other predictions.
We thought Buster Posey would keep the Pirates running game in check and Pirates would have no more than two stolen bases in the series. They had two stolen bases so this prediction was correct.
We also said the Pirates would split the series with the Giants. They ended up 1-3 even though they should have easily split the series after leading Wednesday’s game 6-1. So this was a frustrating miss.
We thought Josh Harrison would have two multi-hit games, however he did not have any. He had a tough week with a lot of hard-hit balls right at defenders.
We also said Jameson Tallion would rebound. We predicted no more than 90 pitches for the first five innings and less than 3 earned runs. Instead he only went 4 innings on 70 pitches with 4 earned runs.
All in all, we had another 2 for 5 week, although we did get the big hit this time.
Next week (June 27 through July 3), the Pirates travel to Seattle and Oakland to play in a couple of American League parks. This means they will be using a designated hitter so Matt Joyce and David Freese should see a lot of playing time. The Pirates offense will be humming and we think they will score a lot of runs.
Therefore, the five predictions for this week will simply be five wins out of six games. Easy to track – hard to do.
Be sure to tune in next week and see how we did.
Featured Image Credit – Daniel Decker Photography
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