The Pirates continued their losing ways in a new city and series Tuesday night as they were blanked 2-0 in another life less, pathetic and embarrassing performance. Paul Skenes gave up two runs (one earned) in just five innings as he was pulled at just 65 pitches. Those two runs were enough for the Marlins as the Pirates bats didn’t show up to this one with just four hits and no extra-base hits. Tyler and Jim recapped this one on the NS9 Postgame Show powered by Primanti Bros. You can watch and listen here…
Here’s my 3 takeaways from this one:
Season Was on the Line and the Bats Had Four Hits
The season was on the line Tuesday night in Miami. Every game right now is essentially a must win. Like Doug has been saying, the playoffs start now, you have to win. Your ace and horse on the mound in Paul Skenes. The Marlins have a righty starting in Eury Perez so you can’t even use the LHP excuse. All this on the line and the Pirates bats went out and put up one of the more embarrassing, life less performances you’ll see. The Pirates lineup recorded four lousy singles. Perez went seven shutout innings with just three hits allowed, two walks and struck out seven. Once again, the Pirates made it entirely too easy on the opposing starter. The first five hitters in the lineup: Jake Mangum, Brandon Lowe, Bryan Reynolds, Spencer Horwitz and Nick Gonzales went 0-for-18 with 8 strikeouts. Just an absolutely pathetic performance by this offense against a pitcher the Pirates should hit. No urgency, no life, just a quick, dead offense. This offense was top 5 all season, but they are dropping off fast as we head into the dog days of August and it’s almost unrecognizable from just a couple months ago. They are killing this team right now. Here’s some numbers to drive the point home about how bad they’ve been in the second half:
- This is Pirates fourth time being shut out in the second half
- They’re 3-11 in the past two weeks
- And they’re 6-15 since the Cleveland series
Looks Like Others are Finally Worried About Paul Skenes
Skenes went five innings in this loss, gave up two runs and was pulled after just 65 pitches and five innings. His velo was down again and now other folks seem to be worried finally about it. Even Michael McKenry:
Skenes was asked about if he was surprised by being pulled after 65 pitches. Here’s his answer via Matt Press:
I’m not sure what this quote is. Paul Skenes looks lost, sounds lost and it reads like someone who’s given up. He had been averaging 96.9 mph on his four-seam fastball this season which is way down from his first two seasons, but in this game he was averaging down near 95.7 mph. It’s been a major red flag all season. And no one seems to have any answers about it including Skenes. I can’t imagine you would pull Skenes, who wasn’t even bad in this loss, at 65 pitches if you didn’t think he was hurt. I’ve said it since about June that he’s had a dead arm, but maybe it’s even worse than that and he’s injured. If that’s true and he’s actually injured and been pitching through it, everyone associated with this team needs fired. This season has continually become one of the more frustrating seasons out there, but Skenes performance has been so disappointing this season as the best pitcher in the world, the reigning Cy Young winner, looks completely lost, broken and injured.
Ben Cherington Has Failed…Again
This is year 7 of Ben Cherington’s regime, and once again the Pirates aren’t going to the playoffs. Cherington has failed this team. And I don’t want to hear about injuries or how many moral victories they had this year and got better internally, blah blah blah. Injuries happen to every team, it is what it is. Deal with it, next man up, coach someone to show up and perform or employ better depth. This is a results business and they’ll likely going to finish under .500 again. Actually, this is a results business and it’s also supposed to be an entertaining product. Right now, the Pirates are not very entertaining. Oh and we were guaranteed going to finish about the retooling Cardinals right?
Dan is spot on here. These teams were all very clearly retooling and they pretty much all sold at the deadline too while the Pirates bought. And here we are once again where the Cardinals are ahead of us in the standings again. Just a colossal failure at every level. Period full stop.
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