PIRATES HIT BACK, BEAT PADRES, 8-4
Teams combine to walk 17, hit 7 batters
Convention drove down to PNC Park, forgot its ticket and was turned away from the ballpark. Normalcy showed up, too, but seemingly left before the game started. Probably had too much to drink.
The Pirates played what appeared to be a baseball game Tuesday night, even though it might not have looked much like one, an 8-4 victory over the San Diego Padres that surely won’t wind up in the Louvre.
The teams combined for 17 walks, 7 errors, 3 wild pitches, 7 hit batters and a passed ball. The first inning consisted of 75 pitches over 51 minutes, and it didn’t get much better after that.
“Sometimes you win ugly,” Pirates manager Derek Shelton said. “[Tuesday], we won ugly.”
For 4 hours, 7 minutes, the Pirates and Padres treated clean baseball like a hand grenade, careful not to get too close or touch it for too long, fearful the whole building might blow up. Somewhere, Miguel Del Pozo smiled.
By the fifth inning, when Wilmer Difo registered his fourth
strikeout of the night, it hardly registered as a blip on the grander scale of one thoroughly crazy evening. One that included:
• Seven walks for pitcher Chad Kuhl, this after Pirates starting pitchers walked four combined over the previous four games.
• Overall, Pirates pitchers walked 13, while Padres hitters left the bases loaded in three of the first six innings. San Diego went 1 for 13 with runners in scoring position and stranded 15. (The teams combined to leave 27.)
• Padres starter Blake Snell, a Cy Young Award winner, was yanked after two-thirds of an inning with the left-hander steaming as he stomped through the Padres dugout. The first inning — which set the tone for this whole mess — lasted 51 minutes and consisted of 75 pitches.
• Exactly one 1-2-3 inning. “Just the way baseball works,” Kuhl said. “It feels like some days are hitting days and walking days. Some days are pitching days. It’s just how baseball works sometimes.”
Perhaps the craziest part of this told the story of the game, as the Pirates somehow put together enough offense to hang a touchdown on the best pitching staff in baseball, a group that came into Tuesday’s game with a 1.80 ERA.
The Pirates (4-7) had to dig out a first-inning hole after Padres center fielder Trent Grisham led off the game with a solo home. The Padres extended their lead to 2-0 when Kuhl walked second baseman Jurickson Profar with the bases loaded, but the Pirates rallied with two outs in the bottom half of the inning.
Following a Bryan Reynolds single and Phillip Evans walk, Jacob Stallings whacked a hanging slider off the wall in left, scoring two. While starting each of the past five games, Stallings is hitting .500 (8 for 16) during that stretch.
“I’ve been on time,” Stallings said. “Usually when I’m in a good position and on time, good things happen. It’s been nice, for sure.”
Erik Gonzalez added a double off of Snell to push the Pirates in front, 3-2. Snell walked Adam Frazier and hit Anthony Alford before Padres manager Jayce Tingler had seen enough, pulling Snell after just 38 pitches.
San Diego tied the score, 33, in the top of the second after Grishman walked, advanced to second on an errant pickoff throw from Kuhl — the Pirates’ first error in 38 innings — reached third on a flyout to center and scored on a wild pitch. But the Pirates answered with two more runs in the second.
Kevin Newman got things going with a leadoff double and scored when Reynolds shot an outside, 0-2 changeup the other way into left. The terrific piece of hitting pushed the Pirates back in front, 4-3.
Stallings took the same approach with Reynolds standing on second base after a wild pitch, driving an 89 mph
four-seamer the other way to pick up his third RBI of the game.
Newman stretched the Pirates’ lead to 6-4 in the third with his second hit of the night, a single through the left side. After his incredible spring, during which he hit .606, Newman entered the game at .171. But he might have found a spark against the Padres.
Kuhl walked two more in the fourth — his seven walks representing a career-high — before giving up an RBI single to Eric Hosmer, the Padres first baseman driving an elevated sinker to center.
“The fix is in the strike zone,” Shelton said. “He’s just really inconsistent with his timing. His arm slot tends to drift, and when that happens, you end up being rotational and you end up being out of the zone.”
The Pirates tacked on a seventh run with a pinchhit RBI from Colin Moran, who pounded another changeup back up the middle to score Gonzalez. Speaking of the Pirates infielder, he picked up his third hit of the game in the eighth, his single scoring Evans to make it 8-4.
Some interesting stuff happened in the eighth when Padres pitcher Taylor Williams plunked Evans, which Stallings said he viewed as retaliation for the Pirates’ pitchers being wild.
“I was not surprised,” Stallings said.
On this wacky night, it might have been the only time.
“It was weird,” Stallings said. “It was just a weird game.”