The Pirates are on a long streak of very good baseball. They’ve won 13 of their last 16 games, they’ve completed one of their best road trips in recent memory, and their offense is starting to resemble the juggernaut that tore through the National League last September on their way to a Wild Card Game. The Brewers are on a long streak of very bad baseball. They are 20-38, which is literally worse than anybody else.
Perhaps because I’m a preternaturally nervous person with way too much of an imagination, this has me worried. It’s impossible for any baseball team’s hot streak to last for forever, and coming home to play the Brewers after a road trip like the one the Pirates just wrapped up feels like an easy place for a team to let down where they shouldn’t. You can add in that Andrew McCutchen is out of the lineup tonight after tweaking his knee late in yesterday’s game (I’m hoping that this is more preventative than anything, given how the last knee injury of his played out), and, well, this feels like a bit of a trap game tonight.
It will be interesting to monitor the Pirate offense’s recent progress through the lens of Jimmy Nelson tonight. Nelson blasted his way through the Pirate lineup in his first start of the year and the Bucs didn’t have much more luck with him when they faced him again five days later. He’s given up at least four runs in four of his last six starts, though, and Andrew McCutchen or no Andrew McCutchen, it seems like this offense is firing on enough cylinders to put some runs across the plate on a guy like Nelson. AJ Burnett starts for the Bucs. His last two starts haven’t been particularly good, but the Pirate offense has propped him up in both of them without much issue. Burnett’s Pirate career has tended to be streaky, so let’s hope that tonight is the start of another good run for him.
The first pitch tonight is at 7:05.
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
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