Kovacevic: Taillon, pitchers learning 'in a sick way'

"My stuff," Jameson Taillon would tell me, "it was pretty good, I thought."

Show of hands: Who else hates when a pitcher says that after a loss or a lousy line?

Yeah, thought so. I do, too, actually.

But when he's right, he's right. And even though the Pirates took another loss on this summery Thursday afternoon at PNC Park, 8-7 to the Dodgers, and even though Taillon's line was a laborious five innings, three runs, eight hits and 92 pitches, the hard fact is that he had to perform pretty well to get where he did.

"Man, those guys made it tough on J.T." Josh Harrison would say of Los Angeles' gazillion-dollar lineup. "So patient. So smart. They really wanted to work him."

Which they did right off the bat, so to speak, with Joc Pederson's leadoff home run off the flattest fastball conceivable:

There'd be other trouble in other spurts, notably from the Dodgers' many lefty hitters, who'd go 5 for 13 against Taillon, all while working deep counts. But I can count at least three other meaningful things that occurred along the way:

1. Six of Los Angeles' seven other hits off Taillon were softies, two of them plain old bunts, one off splintered wood.

"Those will happen," as Clint Hurdle spoke.

Yep. That's baseball.

2. Taillon pumped 17 first-pitch strikes to the 24 batters he faced. And even with counts running deep and Elias Diaz running out of fingers for fresh offerings -- "I had to call everything we had," Diaz would tell me, "because they kept waiting or fouling off good pitches" --  he still kept right on pumping. Seven strikeouts, one walk and only one three-ball count.

3. This one's my favorite: Of those seven strikeouts, five came looking.

Three of them came consecutively, beginning with the final out of the first inning on a trademark 12-to-6 curve to .354 MVP-level Matt Kemp. Opening the second inning was the backdoor model of the curve to Cody Bellinger, then a bloodthirsty slider to Chris Taylor, right at Diaz's mitt:

That's to say nothing of twice freezing Yasmani Grandal, once on a 96-mph vapor trail to Taylor that unfairly followed an all-strike sequence of slider, sinker, curve and slider.

Swing and a miss, foul, foul, foul, go sit down.

I'll stress again: All were caught looking at three wholly different paths of pitches, all with widely varying velocities and yet, all coming from the same arm angle.

"He's doing a good job of mixing pitches, even mixing in his changeup to a few lefties," Hurdle replied when I raised this. "I think the overall execution of those pitches, the way he and Diaz were changing some things up, that might have caught them off-guard at times. They definitely made him throw more pitches than he wanted to, but he hung right with them, never allowed more than a run in any inning."

I asked Taillon about this, and the candor was wonderful:

Better yet, when I turned off the camera, he added with a grin, "Hey, that's a great lineup over there. Something like this ... I think it's good for me in kind of a sick way."

Within earshot at nearby stalls, both Joe Musgrove and Chad Kuhl laughed. They get it. And they should.

Look, nobody wants to hear this right now. Since achieving the season high of nine games over .500 on May 17, the Pirates have lost 14 of 19 games, six series in a row, and they're stuck at .500 -- 31-31 -- as they embark on a trip to Chicago and Phoenix to take on two of the National League's better teams. Chances are, this won't end well.

But chances were right about there, anyway, if we're being honest. The schedule was soft for the first 2 1/2 months, and now that it isn't, the single most unpredictable element to this roster -- the starting pitching -- has solidified itself into exactly that. No one knows what they'll get from Taillon, Musgrove, Kuhl, Trevor Williams or Nick Kingham, ranging from excellent to excruciating from game to game, even from inning to inning.

I'm hardly one to manufacture excuses for the Pirates or any team I cover, but there's a massive one in this event: All five of those guys are either 25 or 26 years old. The only veteran, Ivan Nova at age 31, is on the disabled list, and he was stinking it up before he got hurt.

No, I'm not ready to punt on 2018, and I'm positive the players in this clubhouse aren't. They genuinely feel, rightly or wrongly, that they've got a lineup that matches up with most anyone's, and they feel like the pitching can still swing to the positive end of that range. Good for them. Not a lot of us had imagined, I'll bet, we'd still be speaking of the Pirates in any meaningful context in June.

At the same time, the starting pitching must mature, whether it's this year or next, for this franchise to regain a real competitive footing. And since there's virtually no chance of adding it from the outside -- Neal Huntington's made clear again and again that it's the most imperative position to produce from within because of the extraordinary cost through free agency -- then what these guys do the rest of the way really matters.

That won't be smooth. It just won't.

The lowest ERA in the rotation, among those with five-plus starts, is Kuhl's 3.86, but Kuhl's been clubbed for 12 home runs. The leader in strikeouts is Taillon with 67, but he's had three starts cut shorter than four innings. Williams was the staff's most consistent performer across the board until getting slammed for 18 runs in as many innings over his past four starts. Kingham was messing with a perfect game in his debut, but he's been tagged with at least three runs in all four starts since. And Musgrove, outstanding in his first two starts since recovering from the bum shoulder, was brought back down by these same Dodgers two nights ago.

Collectively, even with the many bright spots, the results are mediocre across the board:

So in that context, yeah, Taillon's line was ... whatever. But I'll maintain that he's a better pitcher Thursday evening than he was Thursday morning, that, as bright as he is, he'll be able to log not only the experience but also the confidence.

You know, the sick way.

• The bullpen's been almost identical in this regard, all the way back to the suddenly maddening Felipe Vazquez. On this day, Tyler Glasnow and Michael Feliz each gave up a home run, and each was hit hard enough to combine for five runs allowed.

Glasnow can be forgiven. He'd allowed two runs in his previous 10 appearances, spanning 16 2/3 innings, and showed dynamic form at times.

Feliz ... not so much. This was the sixth consecutive appearance in which he's been scored upon, accounting for a dozen runs over 5 2/3 innings. Even his outs are rockets.

Hurdle brought up a possible personnel change unsolicited afterward, saying, "Right now, we're looking for better execution of pitches. You keep giving them shots. You keep coaching them up. You keep believing in them until we get to a point where we need to make some personnel changes, and I don't believe we're there right now."

• The reason Gregory Polanco never quite comes out of his season-long slump, at least from this perspective, is that he never seems to allow it.

In the third inning, before stepping to the plate, Josh Bell was playfully applying eyeblack and pumping him up, as captured by our photographer Matt Sunday:

And when Polanco made it back to the dugout after an authoritative sac fly tied the score, 1-1, he was beaming as he was congratulated in that same space:

But when he later lunged for an awful strikeout with two aboard, he looked ... not just disgusted but devastated, flicking his helmet in the box like he was about to take his toys and go home:

It's not all mental, but that's got to be a huge portion of it. Because he had four hits over the weekend in St. Louis, a double Wednesday night, the sac fly here ... and this still came across like the end of civilization.

• J-Hay slammed down his stuff in the batter's box once, too, when he was plunked by a Yeury Garcia fastball in the left arm in the fifth inning. His slam was angry, which had me thinking that he's again getting sick of the pinata treatment, particularly since he took one in the ribs Wednesday night.

Upon going to confirm this, I got a striking reply.

J-Hay wasn't pleased about getting hit -- bruises and welts are real -- but he was more upset with himself.

"I had two pitches in that at-bat that I fouled off, and both were hittable," he said. "If I do what I'm supposed to do with those pitches, I don't get hit."

Hm. Baseball.

• The Pirates haven't won a series since taking both of a two-game cameo with the White Sox, the worst team in baseball, May 15-16. And wait, they haven't even won back-to-back games since those two. Just saying.

• Don't let the Dodgers being at .500 fool anyone. That $177 million payroll wasn't going to stay down long and, since May 17, they're 15-5, the best record in that span in Major League Baseball.

To boot, they've got bona fide young talent and more than a little moxie, as was on display on this day with an all-bullpen effort needed to overcome scheduled starter Dennis Santana getting scratched -- sore lat muscle -- four minutes before first pitch. Old friend Daniel Hudson came out for the first inning despite taking parts of three innings the previous night, and eight other relievers were used to patch up the rest of the game.

"You've got to ask guys to do more than they've been asked to do and stretch them more," Dave Roberts would say in the visiting manager's office. "You try to navigate it the best you can, and you understand you don't have a whole lot of margin. To the guys' credit, the bullpen did a fantastic job."

• Yasiel Puig's a spectacularly skilled player. I can't stand watching him play.

Don't misunderstand, please: I can't stand all the get-off-my-lawn complaints about the right and wrong way to do things in baseball. Most of that is nonsense. But in Puig's case, his showboating so often comes at the direct expense of an outcome on the field, as it did when he demolished a double off the top of the center-field fence against Glasnow and ... wow, I'm not sure he took a single step out of the box until the ball had caromed back into play.

No thanks to that.

• The Pirates put up seven runs, so it's not like the Los Angeles bullpen beat them. Most of that came from the two catchers hitting late home runs, with Diaz tearing into a three-run shot into the bleachers in the eighth and Francisco Cervelli with a solo bomb to the same spot the next inning:

That was Cervelli's first career pinch-hit home run, and it only burnished his All-Star credentials: His .930 OPS is miles ahead of Corey Dickerson's .848, and his nine home runs and 35 RBIs are now both tops on the team.

"I'm feeling good, I'm happy, and I'm grateful to God to be able to play the game I love," Cervelli told me. "I just want to play baseball."

And to win. After rounding third upon his home run, with the Pirates now down by just one with two outs remaining, he turned toward the dugout and shouted, "Let's go!"

• Bizarre stat of the day: The Pirates are now 9-10 when homering twice or more in a game.

More consistent pitching is needed, right?

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY