The Pirates suffered another lopsided defeat tonight as their 9-0 loss to the Reds dropped their record to 14-19 on the young season.
The story of the day was Johnny Cueto, who threw a 1-hitter on an astounding 103 pitches. The Pirates couldn't get anything going all night, Ronny Cedeno was the only Pirate to reach base, and he did it twice by way of the single and the hit by pitch. That's pretty much all there is to say about the offense.
There is a little bit more to say about Charlie Morton, who pitched pretty well tonight. He got into some early trouble in the first when the first two batters of the game singled. However, neither of the singles were well hit, and they both came on pretty good pitches. Chris Heisey, who made his ML debut tonight, led off the game with a jam shot roller to third that Andy LaRoche couldn't make a play on, so it went for a lead off single. The next batter, Brandon Phillips, hit a routine ground ball to second that found it's way through the infield because Akinori Iwamura was running to cover second when Heisey took off on the hit and run. If the hit and run were not on, it would have been a routine double play and the Pirates would have been out of the inning after Joey Votto was retired the next at bat. However, the inning continued and the Reds had runners on first and third with nobody out. Votto hit a sacrifice fly, and Scott Rolen hit a double on a pretty good pitch from Morton to score 2 runs.
Morton's 2nd inning took him awhile, but he got out of it unscathed, and after that he shut the Reds down until the 6th, when he gave up one more run which also came on a couple good pieces of hitting on pretty solid pitches. At the end of Morton's night, he had pitched 6 innings and given up 3 earned runs on 7 hits. He walked 2 and struck out 4 while throwing 109 pitches, 68 of them for strikes. Morton looked really good in the middle innings, but some bad luck got him the loss. There was really no avoiding the loss tonight since the Pirates could not even reach 2nd base on Cueto.
The bullpen did not pitch very well, Jeff Karstens gave up 4 runs in 1.2 innings, and DJ Carrasco and Jack Taschner also gave up a run of their own. Brian Burres got some work in in the 9th, he is still scheduled to make the start Friday.
There isn't much to take from this game, just a terrible offense getting dominated by a very strong pitching performance. Hopefully the Pirates can salvage a winning homestand by defeating the Reds tomorrow at 12:35. I will be at the game, so check for my tweets! Let's Go Bucs!
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