Coming into the season, one of the many questions surrounding the Pirates’ offense was if Colin Moran could replace Josh Bell in the lineup at first base.
So far, he’s done that and then some.
With his three-hit performance Tuesday at PNC Park in the Pirates’ 2-1 win over the Royals, Moran raised his season slash line to .289/.348/.506. The Pirates are getting a lot out of production out of the cleanup spot, and a lot of RBIs.
In fact, 16 of Moran’s 17 RBIs this season have come when batting fourth. That’s tied for the most RBIs by a cleanup hitter in all of Major League Baseball with David Peralta of the Diamondbacks.
He opened the scoring in the first inning Tuesday. After Bryan Reynolds drew a two-out walk and advanced to second on a wild pitch, Moran’s first swing of the day was a knock to center. The throw from Michael A. Taylor was up the third base line, and Reynolds was able to evade the tag and score:
At the moment, Moran is on a pace for 120 RBIs in a season. That seems like a tall task, but he’s in a good position to soon pass his 2020 total of 23. His career high is 80 in 2019, and he’s off to a very good pace to break that.
“It just feels good to contribute,” Moran said recently. “Anytime you can do something to get the run across the board, it always feels great… It feels good to contribute.”
Moran’s four home runs are tied with Phillip Evans for the most on the team, a sign that this Pirates club can’t rely on the long ball to score their runs. They need to string hits together.
“We have to figure out ways to create run-scoring opportunities,” Derek Shelton said. “We’ve talked numerous times about how we’re not just going to sit and bang with people, and we did a really nice job executing tonight. And again, sometimes you don’t have to hit the ball hard, you just have to put the ball in play.”
That’s where Moran has done his best hitting so far this year. He’s now 8-for-23 with runners in scoring position (.348), and 5-for-11 in those situations with two outs. He's talked this year about not trying to do too much at the plate, and it's showing in those situations.
Over the past week, Moran drove in the go-ahead run in Thursday’s win over the Tigers, while picking up an RBI in a pair of one-run wins Tuesday and last Wednesday.
It’s been a whole team effort to get the Pirates back over .500, and Moran’s going to keep looking for more early RBIs to keep the hot streak going.
“The way we’ve been pitching, we feel like if we can get ahead early, we like our chances,” Moran said Tuesday.