MINNEAPOLIS -- JT Brubaker's starts all begin the same way: With prepared notes.
Last year, Brubaker got his first taste of the majors and a variety of different roles and challenges. His first look in the bullpen. He built up his pitch count and stretched out midseason. He got his first taste of what major-league competition was like.
It’s a lot for a rookie to take in, but he finished his first year with respectable numbers. Now in his second year, he is taking another step, and it begins with what he brings to those meetings ahead of his starts.
“He's got notes on every hitter, where he wants to attack them, what he wants to do,” Jacob Stallings said. “It's usually right in sync with what [pitching coach] Oscar [Marin] and I and the staff kind of see as well. He's on top of it. It's definitely showing with the way he's throwing the ball."
Friday may have been his best outing yet, though he was on the wrong side of a 2-0 defeat to the Twins at Target Field. Twins starter J.A. Happ took a no-hitter into the eighth, and while Brubaker was not able to match those results, he matched Happ pitch-for-pitch for most of the night.
He finished with two earned runs allowed on five hits and no walks over seven innings and struck out five.
It was a night where Brubaker relied on all five of his pitches. He threw each offering at least 10% of the time in his 79-pitch outing, and while four of his five strikeouts came on his slider, he got at least two outs with each pitch.
It’s been a step in Bruabker’s development from a pitcher, a process that has taken him from someone who didn’t have a guaranteed rotation spot coming into spring to the Pirates’ best starter this month. In the minors, he relied heavily on his best stuff, which was his sinker and slider. Now he is using his full arsenal. Not just throwing it, but using it.
“Just being able to mix, knowing when to go to stuff, just advancing my scouting and stuff like that,” Brubaker said. “So, just the art of pitching, short answer.”
For him, that includes using both of his fastballs -- four-seamers high, sinkers low. When the slider’s working, like it was Friday, it will skip over the heart of the plate and land on the black of the strike zone on his glove side. The curve has spin and can tunnel off the high heat. The changeup plays best as a neutralizer to lefties. When they’re working, the different pitches complement one another.
“The art of pitching,” to borrow his phrase.
For a team that has had very mixed results from their starters thus far, Brubaker has provided some works of art. After a bit of a slow start, lasting just four innings but only allowing one run to score in his season debut, Brubaker went 5 ⅓ innings in his second outing. At the time, it was tied for the longest outing by a Pirate this year. Next time out, he went six innings and allowed just one run. A new season best for Pirates starters. Friday, he did it again.
With every team concerned about not overworking pitchers, Brubaker has been able to provide quality innings without racking up high pitch counts. Through those first four starts, he has recorded a 2.01 ERA.
“I'm pitching at this point,” Brubaker said. “Lowest number of pitches per inning, get the ball on the ground, getting it early, trying to get our offense back in there as quickly as possible.”
Brubaker almost went back out for an eighth inning and the potential complete game, but after the Pirates rallied and the Twins made a pitching change in the top of the eighth, Shelton opted to not send him back out again after sitting on the bench on a chilly night for an extended period of time.
His lone blemishes on the night were a pair of solo home runs, one to Willians Astudillo and another to Jake Cave.
The one to Astudillo was hardly Brubaker’s fault. Stallings wanted a fastball up, and he delivered. It was all the way up at chin-level, but Astudillo still got a hold of it:
“At first, it was, OK, tip my hat,” Brubaker said. “It was up out of the zone, it's where I wanted it and he clipped it. And then they showed the replay on the big screen out there, and it was actually higher than I thought it was, and I'm just like wow. He was cheating to it and got it.”
Cave’s homer came on a hung fastball, the one mistake pitch he made on the night that barely went over the wall in left.
“Other than that, he was in complete control with a pretty good lineup,” Shelton said. “He threw, what, 79 pitches through seven? That’s extremely effective.”
And the Pirates need extremely effective right now, with Steven Brault and Chad Kuhl on the injured list. Brubaker has been that, and has quietly emerged as the pitcher to watch on this team, at least in the early goings. A reminder that in a rebuilding year, there can still be a little art.
MORE FROM THE GAME
• Mired in a long hitless streak, Stallings took the staff bus to the ballpark early Friday to get some extra work in with hitting coach Rick Eckstein. There, the two had a very good conversation and Stallings had a good session.
It was a good thing he did that, because Stallings' eighth inning double was the only hit the Pirates had on the night.
"He was just missing barrels all night and just making quality pitches," Stallings said of Happ. "He was locked in. He's been doing it a long time. So, yeah, he was outstanding."
Happ relied on his fastball all night, throwing it for 77 of his 95 pitches. Despite getting plenty of looks with the heater, the Pirates had a hard time squaring him up, with Stallings' hit and a Phillip Evans ground out being the only two batted balls with an exit velocity of at least 100 mph.
Happ walked Stallings and Erik González in the second but then retired 17 straight up until Stallings' hit. The knock happened to snap an 0-for-19 skid for the backstop.
"You know, baseball's a weird game," Stallings said. "Probably wouldn't have expected one of the guys that had slumped in a little bit to break up a no-hitter, but that's baseball, and I'm glad I did it."
• If Happ had crossed the finish line and thrown the no-hitter, there would have been some controversy.
In the fifth inning, Wilmer Difo hit a comebacker to the mound that Happ could not backhand. The ball squirted away from him, and while he was able to make a throw to first, it caught Difo in the leg. However, instead of it being an infield single, it was ruled that Difo had run out of the baseline and was out. Upon further review, it looked as though Difo had already reached the bag before he was hit with the ball:
That was the third time already this season the Pirates have had an infield single come off the board because the base runner was his by the ball while running down to first.
Shelton said after the game he's "not a huge fan" of the rule, though that would be expected given how it has impacted the Pirates.
"If a right-handed hitter... takes a bit of an off-balance swing, their swing takes them into foul territory," Shelton said. "So they almost have to start foul then run significantly back fair, and guys aren’t doing that. I think you guys see that. Our guys play hard and run hard, and they’re just running hard to get it. It’s just one of those plays."
• Middle infielders Adam Frazier and Kevin Newman had themselves days in the field, with both of them robbing ground ball hits. Shelton said afterwards, "I don’t know if we played a better [defensive] game all year than we played."
No objections from Brubaker.
"I mean, that was a hell of an effort," he said. "... I felt confident, just throwing the ball in the zone, not just in the zone, but hitting the spots and letting them put the ball in play, because we knew that they were a pretty aggressive team."
There were too many plays to gif. Check out the video highlights below.
• Brubaker's long start could have implications for Sunday's game. The Pirates have not announced a starter, but it looks as though their only two options are Wil Crowe, who is on the taxi squad, or a bullpen game. The Pirates have an off-day Monday, and after relying on just Sam Howard Friday, it opens up the possibility to just go with relievers.
Howard struck out the side in his inning of work.
• Frazier's 13-game on-base streak was snapped, going 0-for-4. That included a strikeout with two runners in scoring position in the eighth, the Pirates' last chance to get back into the game.
• Factoid of the night, courtesy of Sarah Slangs of MLB.com: Astudillo's home run was on a pitch that was 4.24 feet off the ground. That's the highest pitch that's been driven for a homer since September of 2019.
Earlier this month, Tyler Anderson gave up one of the lowest thrown home runs to Javier Baez, so the Pirates have been burned on both ends here.
THE ESSENTIALS
THE LINEUPS
Shelton's card behind Brubaker:
Adam Frazier, 2B
Phillip Evans, LF
Bryan Reynolds, CF
Colin Moran, DH
Erik Gonzalez, 3B
Todd Frazier,1B
Jacob Stallings, C
Wilmer Difo, RF
Kevin Newman, SS
And for Rocco Baldelli's Twins:
Luis Arraez, 2B
Josh Donaldson, 3B
Nelson Cruz, DH
Byron Buxton, CF
Alex Kirilloff, LF
Jorge Polanco, SS
Mitch Garver, C
Jake Cave, RF
Willians Astudillo, 1B
THE SCHEDULE
Trevor Cahill (0-2, 9.69) is going to take his turn in the rotation Saturday, facing Michael Pineda (1-0, 1.00). First pitch is at 2:10 p.m. Eastern time.
THE CONTENT
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