Baseball’s weird little summer incursion into interleague play kicks in again tonight with a bunch of those odd home-and-home series kicking off all over baseball. The Pirates have drawn the White Sox this year, which is nice in that the White Sox are in last place in the AL Central and 12-21 on the road, while the Pirates have baseball’s fourth best record and a 19-11 mark at PNC Park.
The pitching matchup tonight is an interesting one, with Francisco Liriano facing off against Carlos Rodon. Rodon was the third overall pick in last year’s draft after a pretty dominant career down the road from me at NC State. His early big league career is off to a good start this year, though it might be fair to say that he’s got a streak of Francisco Liriano in him: despite his 2.66 ERA, he’s walked 24 hitters in 40 2/3 innings. His walk rate looks a bit better since walking 11 hitters over two starts against the A’s and Indians back in mid-May, though. His stats in the three starts since then are pretty excellent — 18 1/3 innings, 19 Ks, 5 BB, and a 0.98 ERA. The Pirates are going with a lefty-heavy lineup again tonight, despite said lineup being absolutely destroyed by Cole Hamels just over 24 hours ago. If the Pirates can work the count against Rodon and get him to walk some hitters and throw some pitches, I’m willing to be they’ll be OK. It is worth noting that his last two outings have been 108 and 116 pitch outings. This is the point where Clint Hurdle seems to want to throttle Gerrit Cole back a bit, though I can’t say that I have any knowledge of how the White Sox handle their young pitchers.
Anyway, Liriano goes for the Bucs and he’s looked quite excellent lately. The lineup is the same today as yesterday, except with Jose Tabata in right and Sean Rodriguez at first. The lefty-lineup hasn’t looked great this year, but this is also the first time the Pirates are seeing lefties back to back, so it seems a little unfair to judge solely on pinch-hitting numbers.
First pitch is at 7:05.
Photo by Jon Durr/Getty Images
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