Just three batters into Wednesday night’s game, Joe Musgrove proved he was no Johnny Vander Meer.
Things didn’t get much better from there for the former Pirate in his return to PNC Park as the home team prevailed over the Padres, 5-1. Musgrove yielded just one run and struck out six but took his first loss of the season.
“I thought they showed signs of putting together a team approach and making me work and not giving me the easy quick outs out of the zone,” Musgrove said on a postgame Zoom call. “I also didn’t feel my stuff was that sharp. Had it been a little sharper, we could have controlled the outs a little more. But overall, I thought I did a decent job of keeping us in the game and competing with what I had.”
The 28-year-old right-hander was on top of the baseball world a week ago when he threw the first no-hitter in Padres’ history against the Rangers on Friday in Arlington. It was a feel-good moment for the local San Diego native, whose week included a team-commissioned mural painted at his high school and a boom for his family’s local coffee business.
Pitching in his first game at PNC Park since being traded by the Pirates in January, Musgrove lost his 32-inning scoreless streak on a Gregory Polanco solo shot, deep off the AHN-sponsored tarp in right field. Bryan Reynolds picked up the first hit in the opening frame.
"It means a lot because he’s my friend, but not when we’re out there competing," Polanco said of the homer against his former teammate. "He was coming off that no-hitter, so this means a lot."
Colin Moran was Musgrove’s first strikeout victim, but that came on an 11-pitch battle that set the tone for competitive at-bats. The Pirates drew a pair of walks and made Musgrove labor as he was chased him from the contest after throwing 81 pitches in four innings.
“Coming off the no-hitter, my assumption was the fact that he would be a little shortened just because of pitching nine innings early in the year,” Derek Shelton said. “We did a nice job. Good stuff early on. Executed pitches, we were able to foul pitches off to extend at-bats and we didn’t score many runs off him, but how we were able to get him out of the game after the fourth was extremely important for us.”
Musgrove still has the fifth-lowest ERA among qualified pitchers in MLB at 0.47 -- Tyler Glasnow is fourth-best with a 0.46 mark -- and his 24 strikeouts rank him eighth.
Not only was his other homecoming spoiled by that pesky Pirates’ lineup, White Sox lefty Carlos Rodon completed his own no-hitter less than an hour after the final out was recorded at PNC Park. But for one night, the Pirates brought him back down to earth.