PITTSBURGH — If Ke’Bryan Hayes is the main attraction for the Pirates right now, then he was worth the price of admission Thursday night against the Miami Marlins.
It was his first game back in the lineup since spending nearly all of the first two months of the season on the injured list with an injured left hand/wrist.
In his first at-bat, in the first inning, he beat out an infield single deep in the hole between shortstop and third base. In the bottom of the sixth, he smashed a ball to the wall in right field, legging it out for a triple, then eventually scoring on a ground ball off the bat of center fielder Bryan Reynolds. He finished 2 for 4.
Hayes made two outstanding defensive plays in the seventh and eighth innings, sprawling out to his left to prevent what likely would have been a two-run single in the seventh, then snagging a scorched line drive down the third-base line in the eighth.
Even still, Hayes might have been upstaged. In the bottom of the eighth, the Pirates still trailed by one. Beyond Hayes and Reynolds, who smacked a solo homer to right field in the fourth, there was no offense to be found. Then the Pirates manufactured something.
Second baseman Adam Frazier singled, Hayes ground out, Reynolds walked and right fielder Gregory Polanco followed suit with a free pass of his own. That brought up catcher Jacob Stallings, who didn’t disappoint. On a 1-2 pitch, Stallings roped a ball into the left-field corner. Frazier and Reynolds scored with ease, while Polanco needed every inch of his long strides to beat out the throw.
Closer Richard Rodriguez slammed the door from there, and the Pirates (21-34) brought home a seemingly unlikely 5-3 win.
What made it so unlikely was that, for much of the evening, Hayes and Reynolds were all the Pirates had. Through the first seven innings of the game, the pair was 4 for 6 with two runs and two RBIs. The rest of the team was 1 for 20. That, normally, is not a recipe for success, but things flipped in the eighth for their benefit.
Really, that late-game rally was made possible by the pitching effort provided by left-hander Tyler Anderson and the bullpen. Anderson wasn’t dominant, as he allowed three earned runs on five hits, but much of that damage came late in his 5 1/3 innings. It also might have been avoided, as he left the game with two runners on base, but right-hander Clay Holmes was unable to strand them.
Holmes stayed in the game for the seventh inning and ran into trouble again, allowing two runners on with no outs on a strikeout-turned-wild-pitch and a walk. Lefty Sam Howard came in to strand those runners, though, thanks in part to Hayes’ diving stop on the ground ball. Right-handers Kyle Crick and Rodriguez did their part from there.
On this night, that’s all the Pirates needed, as the offense didn’t provide all the time, but it provided when it needed to, snapping a three-game losing streak in the process.
