North Shore Nine

The Pirates offense scored 9 runs on 15 hits, really nice days from Jared Triolo, Nick Gonzales and Yasmani Grandal. We aren’t going to talk about any of it. There is only one place to start, and that is with Paul Skenes.

I wasn’t concerned, but I was very interested to see how Skenes would look today facing the same team he faced just days ago. Here’s what he thought about my concerns:

Skenes began the game in unbelievable fashion, striking out the first seven batters he faced. He dominated with all of his pitches, but especially the fastball.

Skenes’ fastball averaged 99.3mph today, and generated 12 swings and misses. That was a large part of his 11 strikeouts. I’m just going to drop these in here:

He finished with six, dominant, no-hit innings and struck out 11. Very simply, an outstanding outing. Throughout the draft process, these were the types of games that we as fans, hoped we’d see. Skenes picked up his first of hopefully many Major League wins.

The bullpen ended up closing the deal. Carmen Mlodzinski struggled a bit in his first major league appearance of the season. Mlodzinski covered an inning and a third, Ryder Ryan and Hunter Stratton covered the rest. The staff struck out 15 Cubs total in the game.

The Pirates will be back in action tomorrow at 2:20 EST in Chicago.