The Pirates’ early success this season largely has centered on their offense. Entering a game Monday night against the Colorado Rockies, they had scored 5.80 runs per game, good for fourth best in Major League Baseball. They were tied for third in slugging percentage and tied for fifth in homers.
But on another cold night at PNC Park, the bats chilled, and the Pirates couldn’t get much going against Rockies starter German Marquez in a 6-2 loss that dropped their record to 11-5.
In a game that started with a light dusting of snow, left-hander Steven Brault, making his third start, struggled to find consistency with his command, allowing five runs over six innings. The Rockies took a 2-0 lead in the first, courtesy of an RBI double by Chris Iannetta, a wild pitch and a ground out to first. Brault settled in for consecutive 1-2-3 innings in the second and third.
“The command was inconsistent overall,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said. “Some better sequences in the second and third but started off inconsistent.”
Things got away from Brault again in the fourth. He walked Ian Desmond, and Carlos Gonzalez hit a hard grounder up the middle that the defense couldn’t snare. Trevor Story then deposited a 2-2 slider over the left-field wall, and the Rockies led 5-0.
“I’ve always felt confident as a fielder,” Brault said of the mix-up on Gonzalez’s single. “And something that I’ve been working on is when a bouncer is going up the middle, it’s much easier for them to just grab it, tag on second and go to first. I swear I looked back and Jordy [Mercer] was right up behind second, and I must have just blanked or something. And so when that ball was hit and I decided to bring the glove back and then I looked back and we weren’t there, and I was like ‘Ah, that is [a] super bummer.’”
The bigger issue, as Brault noted, wasn’t the hit per se, but the fact that he couldn’t put away Story. In the case of Story’s three-run homer and the two walks Brault issued, he got ahead of the batters, 0-2, yet couldn’t retire them. He didn’t have “bite” on his slider, he said — hence why a pitch he hoped would end up in the dirt instead landed in the left-field seats.
“The pitches that I threw, I’m not upset that I threw them,” Brault said. “I’m just upset that I couldn’t execute them, and that’s what it’s all about.”
The struggles aside, Brault was fairly efficient, throwing 86 pitches, 54 for strikes, over the six innings, to go with one strikeout and five hits. In the sixth, Corey Dickerson doubled up Gonzalez and Desmond for his league-leading fourth outfield assist of the season. Dickerson said Starling Marte yelled “tag” to him as he prepared to catch the ball, which helped ready him for the throw to second base.
“During that process, as the ball is coming down, I’m able to get my feet under me and know what I wanted to do with the ball,” Dickerson said.
Marquez, a 23-year-old right-hander, was making his first start since being ejected for his role in a Rockies benches-clearing brawl with the San Diego Padres last week. (Nolan Arenado, the Rockies’ stellar third baseman, is serving a suspension for his part in the fight and will not play against the Pirates this week.)
Through 4⅓ innings, the Pirates had only one baserunner, Marte, who reached on a walk and advanced to third on a steal and a throwing error. In the fifth, the Pirates started to crack Marquez. Francisco Cervelli hit a triple just beyond Gonzalez’s outstretched glove in right field, and he scored on Colin Moran’s sacrifice fly. In the next inning, Marte tripled for the Pirates’ second hit, bringing home Gregory Polanco. Still, in total, the Pirates had just four hits in the game and struck out 10 times. Dickerson extended his hitting streak to 11 games with a single in the seventh.
“I think we could’ve had — definitely as a collective group — could’ve had better approaches at the plate, but he pitched a good ballgame,” Dickerson said. “We just got to him too late.”
Tyler Glasnow pitched two innings and allowed one run, a solo homer to Charlie Blackmon; it was Blackmon’s third consecutive game with a homer.
“We’ve got to throw more strikes,” Hurdle said of Glasnow. “It’s two out of eight first-pitch strikes, it’s four three-ball counts. … Thirty-eight pitches in two innings, you’d like to see more pitch efficiency as well, there’s just work to be done there.”
Elizabeth Bloom: ebloom@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1750 and Twitter @BloomPG.
First Published: April 17, 2018, 1:49 a.m.