The Pirates will face the Chicago Cubs in a three-game series that begins Tuesday evening at PNC Park. Here are some things to know about the NL Central rival.
Kris Bryant is officially back — The former MVP has looked much more like himself than he did in pandemic-shortened 2020, when he hit a lousy .206/.293/.351 while missing a fair amount of time. This season, he’s up to .312/.406/.604 for a 1.009 OPS that ranks fifth in all of baseball. He’s also had 25 extra-base hits — 10 homers and 15 doubles — and is on pace to hit more homers than he has in any season since that MVP campaign in 2016. He enters the series with hits in each of his past six, and eight of his past nine games. The small bit of good news for the Pirates, who were battered by homers against Atlanta over the weekend, is that Bryant is in a bit of a power slump, with just one home run to his name since smacking two in a loss at Cincinnati on May 2.
The outfield is banged up — Jason Heyward and Jake Marisnick have both landed on Chicago’s injured list with hamstring strains over the past couple of weeks. Marisnick’s injury came first. He’s been out since May 11. And Heyward landed on the shelf with his injury late last week. That might be for the best, too, as he’s been struggling most of the season with a line of .183/.254/.341 in 39 games. That’s … pretty bad. Bryant has played a fair amount of outfield in their absence. Ian Happ has gotten back into the fray after missing the early part of May with a rib injury. The Mt. Lebanon native has responded well since returning May 15 with hits in six of his past eight games. That outburst has pushed his season average to .212, which is obviously not great but much better than the .167 he hit the injured list with.
The pitchers the Pirates will face have been very meh — Jake Arrieta will start Tuesday and has probably been the best of the bunch with a 4.46 ERA and 1.30 WHIP. Not the numbers he was putting up when he diced up the Pirates in the NL wild card game in 2015, but better than his teammates’ for sure. Kyle Hendricks, the theoretical ace of the staff who will start Wednesday, has not looked like himself at all. His 4.74 ERA and 1.50 WHIP are way above his career averages of 3.19 and 1.12, respectively, though he’s been better this month beyond his May 9 start in which the Pirates roughed him up for six runs. Then there’s Trevor Williams, who doesn’t look like he’s any closer to figuring it out than he was in his last season in Pittsburgh. If anything, he’s probably going backward. He’s failed to finish the fifth inning in each of his May starts and has an ugly 8.78 ERA in that span, pushing his season mark to 5.97 after it stood at a reasonable 4.44 at the end of April.
Adam Bittner: abittner@post-gazette.com and Twitter @fugimaster24.
First Published: May 25, 2021, 10:00 a.m.
