Pittsburgh Pirates Takeaways & Throwaways – Big Win in LA

The Pittsburgh Pirates took the first game of the weekend series in Los Angeles with a 5-1 win over the Dodgers on Friday, to pull them even closer to one of the Wild Card spots in the National League. Here are the takeaways and throwaways from the game.

Takeaways

• The offense started the game with a bang, with Josh Harrison, Starling Marte and Andrew McCutchen all knocked singles to start the inning. All three of them scored and McCutchen even added his fifth stolen base of the season. Hopefully the top of the lineup continues to click like this, as it could go a long way in getting the team back into a playoff position.
• McCutchen and Jordy Mercer both homered in the game, their 16th and seventh home runs respectfully. What is really incredible is that now McCutchen has 46 RBIs while Mercer has 42. At the beginning of the season no one would have predicted that Mercer would be just four RBIs behind McCutchen at this point of the season, but McCutchen’s down season and Mercer’s improvement on 2015 have put them this close in the RBI category.

Throwaways

• While Ivan Nova‘s line looks good, it would have been nice to see him make it through six innings. He did pitch well on Friday and only gave up one run on nine hits, but he’ll need to go deeper into games like he did in his first start with the Pirates. Overall it was a fairly good start, he just did not go as deep as the team would have liked. Luckily the bullpen was lights out and did not give the Dodgers a chance to get back into it.

W –  Ivan Nova (9-6)

L – Ross Stripling (3-4)

S – Tony Watson (5)

Line of the Night

Tonight’s Line of the Night goes to the guys in the bullpen that came in after Nova left the game.

Between Antonio Bastardo, Felipe Rivero Neftali Feliz, Juan Nicasio and Tony Watson, the five relievers combined for three and two third innings of shutout baseball. They only allowed  three hits and struck out five. Friday was a night where Clint Hurdle was able to deploy his relievers in the order that he wanted and receive the performance that he needed from each.

Up Next

The series continues on Saturday at 4:05pm when Gerrit Cole (7-7, 2.94) takes on Brandon McCarthy (2-2, 3.00). Cole’s previous two outings have been abbreviated, as he only lasted five innings in one and five and two thirds of an inning in the other. But prior to that he pitched a marvelous nine inning one run game against the Mariners so he’ll look to have something that resembles that game on Saturday. His opponent McCarthy has also struggled with making it deep into games lately, so hopefully the Pirates can continue that trend and make him exit early on Saturday.