The Pirates won their 2nd game of the year, and their first series of the year today as they defeated the Cubs 5-4. It was a come from behind win as the Pirates went into the 9th inning down 4-3, but got 2 hits and 2 runs off of Carlos Marmol to get the win.
The pre-game story was the news that Andrew McCutchen was scratched from the lineup with neck soreness. Losing McCutchen is a huge hit to the team, but he is fine and will be back in the lineup tomorrow. Despite not having their best hitter, the Pirates still collected an astounding 16 hits. That's a huge number, but it wasn't really as impressive as it sounds.
Amazingly enough, all 16 of the Pirates hits were singles. Yeah, that's hard to believe, but check the box score, it's true. Jose Tabata and Pedro Alvarez led the way with 3 hits each, and Garrett Jones, Lyle Overbay, and Ronny Cedeno all chipped in 2 hits of their own.
Despite the quantity of hits, there only a handful of them that were hit hard. Most of the hits were ground balls that found holes or bloop shots into the shallow parts of the infield. The Pirates were very lucky today.
The crazy part about all of these hits is that they came on a day when the Pirates struck out 13 times. It seemed that every time a ball was put into play it found a way to go for a hit. 13 of the 27 outs the Cubs got came by the strike out, that's 48% for all you math people out there.
Let's put it this way, 30 balls were put into play by the Pirates, and 16 of them went for hits. That's a BABIP of .533, a ridiculous number. That just isn't going to happen very often, if ever again. The Pirates were very lucky today, and it would have been a pretty big disappointment to lose a game that they got this much good fortune in.
On the more negative side, the Pirates have been striking out at an incredibly alarming rate. They have struck out 32 times in the 27 innings they have played so far this year. Today alone showed the importance of putting the ball in play, and the Pirates have not done a great job of that this year. They are a young team with a lot of batters with holes in their swing, but they are going to have to do a better job if they want to continue to be consistently productive offensively, check back later tonight for another post more about this strikeout problem.
On the other side of the ball, Ross Ohlendorf took the hill and did an okay job. He went 6 innings, giving up 8 hits and 4 earned runs. The consensus was that he was going to removed after the 5th inning, but the Pirates let him hit in the top of the 6th and sent him back to the mound in the bottom of the inning. It turned out not being a good decision, as he gave up the go-ahead run off the bat of Alfonso Soriano, who hit quite an impressive home run on a high fastball.
Ohlendorf has decent velocity, he's had trouble being consistent in that part of his game in his career, but his control really wasn't that great. He gave up a good amount of very hittable pitches, some of which were taken advantage of, some were not. In the 4th inning, Ohlendorf loaded the bases with nobody out and served up a meatball to Carlos Pena, who missed a grand slam by about 5 feet at the most. After that he buckled down, got a couple of pop outs and then got out of the inning, limiting the damage to 2. He was good in that respect, but wasn't impressive other than that.
I don't have very big expectations for Ohlendorf this year, and today didn't do much to convince me otherwise. We'll see how he fairs in his next couple outings, there's not much you can take from a pitcher's first outing.
At the end of the day, the Pirates got a very encouraging win and started the year off right, winning 2 of 3 road games. Let's take a look at the updated batting and starting pitching stats:
