The hallmarks of the Pirates' recently concluded 11-game winning streak had been their solid all-around play in every facet of the game. They were hitting in bunches, seemingly every pitcher made a quality start, and the defense was impeccable.
Well, there was none of that on Thursday. And now the Pirates are working on another streak: Two straight losses.
Much like their loss a day earlier in Cleveland that ended their longest winning streak in 22 years, the Pirates' bats went silent again in an ugly 12-6 loss to the hapless New York Mets on Thursday.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCORE, STANDINGS, VIDEOSure, David Freese and Josh Harrison each hit two-run homers, the latter tying the game at four in the fourth, but, in the end, those were just a side note in what became the Pirates' worst loss since a 17-5 drubbing at the hands of the Phillies on July 6.
Now, this wasn't nearly as demoralizing as that defeat and no one was really expecting the Pirates to go 59-0 the rest of the way, but Thursday's loss was a reminder that this was a team that had gone 14-31 not that long ago.
Unlike Cleveland's Trevor Bauer, who two-hit the Pirates a day earlier, Steven Matz isn't a legit Cy Young candidate. But, man, the Mets starter certainly looked it against the Pirates.
The left-hander matched a career high by striking out nine over six innings, allowing four runs on three hits.
"He was pounding the zone," Josh Bell was telling me afterwards. "He was throwing all his pitches for strikes for the most part. We got to him a couple times, couple big homers, but for the most part it was strikes early, had some good put-away pitches on the inner half, good cross-body angle. It was just working for him tonight."
That would stand in stark contrast to his Pittsburgh counterpart. You're only as good as your starting pitching, and Nick Kingham wasn't very good on Thursday. Though there were other contributing factors to this latest loss that we'll get into later, it started with him.
As Clint Hurdle put so succinctly: “Inconsistent execution across the board, pretty much with all of the pitches ... There just wasn’t anything good happening for Nick tonight as far as getting consistent execution.”
Kingham spotted the Mets a two-run lead in the first on Wilmer Flores' two-run homer even after recording the first two outs with ease.
After Freese's two-run homer tied the game in the bottom half of the inning, Kingham gave the lead right back in the second on Asdrubal Cabrera's RBI double.
He gave up another run in the third and, in hindsight, probably should have been pulled then. Instead, Hurdle chose not to pinch-hit for him. Even after Harrison's two run homer tied the game at 4-4, Kingham gave the lead right back.
He issued a lead-off walk to Amed Rosario and then Cabrera got hold of Kingham's 83-mph changeup, sending it over the wall in right to give the Mets the lead for good:
And that was that for Kingham, who threw 74 pitches, 41 for strikes, in just over three innings while allowing seven hits and four walks. It was his first loss after winning each of his previous three starts, two of which he pitched into the seventh inning. As he explained, he just didn't have it:
It was the shortest outing by a Pirates starter since July 14 when Ivan Nova went 4.2 in the first game of a doubleheader against Milwaukee. Of course, the Pirates won that game, 2-1.
In their previous 15 games, Pirates starters had a combined ERA of just 2.48. Needless to say that number went up after Kingham's went up to 4.80.
But if it's any consolation to Kingham, those who came in after him weren't appreciably better.
Tyler Glasnow topped out at 100 mph on the radar gun but also gave up a run and walked four in his three innings of duty.
The Mets put the game away for good in the seventh, tacking on three more runs against Richard Rodriguez, who struggled mightily with his command. He gave up three runs on four hits while uncorking a pair of wild pitches, one of which scored a run.
Michael Feliz pitched the eighth and ninth, allowing two runs on three hits and throwing yet another wild pitch.
In all, the Mets scored in seven different innings and their 12 runs equaled their most since June 18 at Colorado. In Thursday's heat, PNC Park certainly played like Coors Field for the Mets, particularly to right field.
The four lefties in New York's starting lineup --Cabrera, Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo and rookie Jeff McNeil -- went a combined 6-for-14 against Pirates pitching. Cabrera accounted for three of those hits while driving in four runs.
Though they would seem to be set with Edgar Santana, Kyle Crick and Felipe Vazquez in the back end of the bullpen, if the Pirates are to make a move before the July 31 trade deadline, another arm in the bullpen would seem to be the prudent move.
In the meantime, the Pirates need to move on from this one and quickly. They fell to 53-51 and are in third place in the NL Central, eight games behind the Cubs, who just went out and acquired Cole Hamels from Texas. Despite the loss, the Pirates are still just 3.5 games back in the wildcard race.
"You gotta have a good understanding of what went wrong in the game," Bell was telling me. "Just have that ability to shower it off, rinse it off and comeback tomorrow ready to play."
Jordan Luplow hasn't been around very long but he says the Pirates didn't get too high when they won 11 in a row, and they aren't about to get too down on themselves after dropping two in a row.
“I don’t think that happens with guys like this in the clubhouse," he said. "We’ve got some veteran guys: (Francisco) Cervelli, Sean (Rodriguez), David Freese, J-Hay, those guys bring it every day. Those guys bring the energy, that passion."
1. No quit in Luplow.
No, he doesn't have quite the pedigree nor the stats of Austin Meadows, but Luplow has acquitted himself fairly well in a small sample size.
Though it's not saying much, he was easily the Pirates' best player on Thursday, going 2-for-5 at the plate with a triple and RBI, to raise his average to .182. But what stood out was the 24-year-old's work with the glove.
Playing in place of the injured Corey Dickerson in left field for a second straight game, Luplow made two sensational plays in the eighth and ninth innings of a game that was well out of hand.
In the eighth, Devin Mesoraco lined a drive deep into the left-field gap that Luplow was somehow able to track down just before the wall.
"Just trying to cover some ground, trying to get outs for our pitcher, more importantly, trying to get in there and hit," he said.
An inning later, Conforto lofted a lazy fly down the line in foul territory that Luplow had to run about 100 feet to get to. Luplow made a sliding, backhanded grab near the seats:
Not only that, Luplow came up firing to keep Cabrera -- at least temporarily -- at third.
"That's one of my things: I love playing defense and I love having the pitcher's back and them knowing that if it's hit out there, I have a pretty good chance to catch it," Luplow said.
In the second inning, a heads-up play by Luplow nearly resulted in a double play. After Matz lined out to left, he fired to first and would have had Mesoraco out had Bell been able to field a fairly routine one-hopped throw.
2. A comedy of errors.
Bell's drop of Luplow's throw was just a harbinger of things to come.
Officially, they were "credited" with three errors -- Harrison, Freese and Franisco Cervellli -- but that doesn't even take into account the wild pitches and the brain cramps that plagued them all game. The Pirates now have 66 errors on the season, fifth most in baseball.
In the interest of not crashing your computers, mobile devices, or crashing the power grid that serves the mid-Atlantic states, I'm not going to be able to show videos of every blunder in the field Thursday but I'll give you this one which, depending on your view, may have been most egregious. This was Freese's throwing error in the calamitous fourth inning:
“He’s fighting like everybody else out there," Hurdle said of the usually reliable veteran. "He’s diving for a ball in the ninth inning. ... We were just too rough in too many areas to overcome what they were able to put on the board.”
Other lowlights included Jordy Mercer dropping a line drive to short, but at least he was still able to throw out Flores at first.
Bell had a catchable line drive go off his glove in the eighth. In the ninth, Gregory Polanco -- not a great fielder to begin with -- had a play on Cabrera's fly ball to right. Instead it went off near the base of the wall for a double.
3. Where's the buzz?
The red-hot Pirates opened their nine-game homestand, in their first game at PNC Park since their miraculous win over Milwaukee on July 15, with a dud of a performance.
But if you thought that the goodwill generated by an 11-game winning streak would somehow dramatically increase attendance on the North Shore, you'd be wrong. The game drew an announced crowd of 21,981 on a gorgeous Thursday night:
Doesn’t look like winning has boosted attendance much but lots of Meta fans here. And Mets, for lack of better word, stink. #dkps #pirates pic.twitter.com/84MjeZd8SU
— Chris Bradford (@PghBradford) July 27, 2018
To be fair, that's 3,826 above their season average through 51 home dates, though a fairly large percentage of the crowd seemed to be wearing the blue and orange of the Mets, a team with the third-worst winning percentage in the National League.
Obviously, ticket sales are almost always done well in advance of a game, but the size of the crowd was somewhat disappointing.
"Given what we've done, hopefully, nice," Harrison was telling me before the game of what he hoped the crowd would be like. "But nonetheless our job is not to worry about the environment, our job is to go out between the white lines and do what we need to do."
After what fans endured Thursday, it's hard to see a crowd getting much bigger for a weekday game. Fortunately for the Pirates, who are 29-25 at PNC Park, they have eight more games on this homestand to gain ground in the standings.
"Sometimes home field can, I don't want to say, work against you, but it doesn't matter where you play between those white lines," Harrison said. "If you take care of what you have to, you can come out on top. But it's always nice to do it at home."