SAN DIEGO -- No Major League Baseball team can expect to win every game, no matter the caliber of competition, but suffice it to say that any team anywhere should be expected to make more than occasionally nominal contact against pitchers with ERAs like this:
Jeff Samardzija: 5.05
Travis Wood: 6.91
Dinelson Lamet: 5.92
Clayton Richard: 5.37
Homer Bailey: 8.37
Robert Stephenson: 7:86
Those names look familiar?
Two of them sure should, as Samardzija mowed down the Pirates in that series finale up in San Francisco, and Wood, who makes other soft-tossing lefties look like Sandy Koufax, followed suit with six solid innings to push the Padres past the Pirates, 3-2, Friday night at Petco Park.
Wood's fastball couldn't have penetrated a wet paper towel, hovering at 86-87 mph, and he hadn't won a game as a starter since ... hang on, let me look this up ... here it is: April 28, 2015, at PNC Park of all places. But he somehow summoned enough for a line of two runs -- both courtesy of an early Andrew McCutchen home run -- with one other hit, seven strikeouts and a walk.
Seriously, folks.
"I don't know what happened," Starling Marte would tell me. "It just wasn't our night."
He went 0 for 3, but he hardly stood out. Cutch went 2 for 3, David Freese had a single, and the collective went 3 for 29 with 12 strikeouts and a walk. And this was against the $68 million Padres, one of the majors' cheapest, youngest and worst teams at 46-57, with the Pirates having planned to try to exploit their inexperience with exactly what boomeranged back to them.
"We've seen him," Clint Hurdle said of Wood. "We knew what to anticipate. We weren't able to punch back."
Punch-outs weren't a problem.
"It was kind of the opposite of what we talked about. We tried to get them in swing mode, and they got us in swing mode. They executed their pitching plan pretty well, stayed out of the middle, kept us off the barrel, that's for sure."
The Pirates lugged a lead into the sixth, when Chad Kuhl, who'd given up one run but also four hits, five walks and plenty of solid contact -- one of them an RBI single to his counterpart Wood -- was lifted with one out in favor of Daniel Hudson.
I asked Hurdle about pulling Kuhl with a pitch count of 97.
"He was up there in pitches," he answered. "Did he have more? Probably. The overall outing, there was some good to it, and I thought there were some challenges to it. When he was ahead in the count, he really pitched well. When he was behind, I thought they really made him work hard."
Kuhl's reaction after another in a string of blah starts?
"I just have to be better," he said. "I'll keep working."
Hudson's first batter, Cory Spangenberg, did this to the first pitch:
That was absurdly deemed a triple by Petco Park's official scorer and, as Hurdle noted, Jordan Luplow, just called up from the minors, "didn't handle the ball," adding, "It should have been a double and an error on the play."
One run scored there, and Spangenberg trotted home with the winner on a Hudson wild pitch that bounced a yard in front of the plate.
Hudson didn't appear tickled afterward:
