The Pirates defeated the Cubs 6-3 today to start their 2011 season on the right foot. The big story of the game was Neil Walker's grand slam in the 5th inning, I'm sure you can read about that at about any other Pirate blog on the Internet, so for this post I want to focus on the pitching performance.
Here's Correia's basic line: 6+ IP, 7 H, 3 R, 2 ER, 1 BB, 3 K
The 2 earned runs were both pretty preventable if the defense would have made the plays. The Cubs 3rd run of the game came after an infield pop up fell in right between home plate and the pitchers mound. Pedro Alvarez should have came in, called everybody off, and made the catch, but he didn't take charge and the ball fell in. Correia was pulled after that for Garrett Olson, who gave up a couple of hits and the Cubs got on the board for the 3rd time of the game. Alvarez had some major struggles on defense today, including a pretty bad throwing error in the first inning that led to the first run of the game. We all knew Alvarez wasn't a good defensive third baseman, but we know he can do better that he did today.
Getting back to Correia, we could tell that he really didn't have his full velocity today. He was consistently around 87-89 with his fastball, that's usually going to be between 89-92, still not the least bit impressive, but better nonetheless. Correia did get a lot of swings and misses and weak contact with his breaking balls today, so it was nice to see him have another strong pitch when his fastball wasn't the best.
Control was certainly not an issue for Kevin today. He threw 92 pitches, 61 of them for strikes. He walked only 1 despite throwing first-pitch strikes to only half the batters he faced (13/26).
On the day, Correia gave up 10 ground balls, 9 fly balls, 3 line drives, and 3 strikeouts from the 92 pitches he threw. The fielders really did not do well with the ground balls today. There weren't a whole lot of spots where the fielders had to make plays at first, there were a bunch of fielders choices, but they didn't look good in the small sample. It seemed that everyone was having trouble scooping balls up off the ground. Now the conditions weren't good, it was raining all game, but that's really no excuse for a big league infielder. It certainly wasn't pretty. The Pirates did not turn a double play today, even though they had a couple chances.
Correia got better and better as the game went on, and Hurdle showed him some confidence by leaving him in the game to pitch in the 7th inning, even though he had to hit in the top of the inning. Correia made us nervous early on with his lack of velocity and the 6 hits he surrendered in the first three innings, but he settled down and really started pitching well to get through the middle innings. From innings 4-6, he retired 9 of the 10 batters he faced. That was huge for the Pirates.
The Pirates got Correia the run support he needed with 2 swings of the bat, and the Pirates new starter didn't disappoint. When all was said and done, Correia matched the win total of his teammate Ross Ohlendorf from the entire 2010 season.
The Pirates are 1-0 and everybody is feeling great. They're back at it tomorrow as they send Paul Maholm to the hill to face Carlos Zambrano and the Cubs again at 1:05 pm.