What a game it was yesterday. First half Mitch Keller did his thing with six innings and another quality start and the bullpen made it close, but was able to shut the door on the Orioles in the 5-4 win. Here’s the NS9 Bullpen Breakdown for game two of this series:
I talked about this in the three takeaways from yesterday’s game, but Dennis Santana was called upon in the 8th inning and he buried the Orioles 1-2-3 in just 10 pitches. How good has he been since coming to Pittsburgh? Well we track stats in baseball so I can tell you exactly how good he’s been. Santana has posted a 2.18 ERA in 114 appearances with the Pirates. That’s an ERA+ of 194. He hasn’t allowed a run this season through five games and he rarely throws more 20 pitches or more. It’s just incredible what he’s done since putting on the Pirates uni.
Mostly everyone who pitched yesterday was efficient as well. Gregory Soto tossed 20 pitches while nailing down the save, Yohan Ramirez went 19 pitches and Mason Montgomery relieved him, got two big outs in just nine pitches. And yesterday we saw Don Kelly play the matchups and pitch Santana in the 8th and brought Soto out in the save opportunity in the 9th. I won’t get back into the strategy again, you can read more about it in last night’s takeaways, but I’m interested to see how Kelly employs the back end of the bullpen moving forward. It also could have been with the two-run lead, Kelly felt more comfortable putting Soto out there for the 9th which obv worked because Soto gave up a solo home run and then finished closing the door.
We’ll see. Today it’s Carmen Mlodzinski making his second start of 2026. For Carmen, it’s length that I want to see in his next couple starts. Get into the 5th inning and work through it to at least go five. He faced the two batters three times in his first outing and gave up a triple and a single before being lifted. If he’s going to consistently be looked at as a starter, he needs to improve in that area so we’ll see how he fares today.
This was Mlod’s breakdown from his first start against the Mets. He had eight strikeouts in 4.1 innings that included eight whiffs. He threw his 4-seamer the most, but mixed in the sinker, splitter and curve each about 20% of the time to keep hitters off balanced. The Orioles have a decent amount of lefties and switch hitters in their lineup so today will be a good test for Mlod.
With Mlod on the mound today, should we expect Jose Urquidy to go after Mlod exits the game? I thought Urquidy or Hunter Barco would have that role after Mlod goes four or five, but we haven’t seen that so far. The only outing we’ve seen from Urquidy was a one-inning save in extra innings. He hasn’t pitched since then and is super fresh right now in that pen. I’m not sure what the plan is for Urquidy if he’s not going to be a bulk guy, but then pitches once a week? Who knows. I still wouldn’t be surprised if we see Barco or Urquidy at some point today.
As far as who’s available, I think everyone is ready to go except Soto probably is unavailable or at least they likely don’t want to go to him unless absolutely necessary with him pitching the past three-out-of-four days. If it’s a close game late, I expect to see Isaac Mattson and Santana as the back end arms today.
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