PITTSBURGH — If any Pirates starting pitcher was going to stop the team’s four-game skid heading into Friday, it probably would have been right-hander JT Brubaker.
The 27-year-old has been the Pirates’ best starter this season, at least. Perhaps that isn’t the toughest competition, since Pirates starting pitchers had the fourth-worst ERA in MLB entering Friday’s game. Still, Brubaker has been good. Two starts ago, he set a career high with nine strikeouts, and last time out he pitched six innings and allowed three earned runs.
Nothing jaw-dropping, necessarily, but he entered Friday with a 3.82 ERA and a 1.133 WHIP, both the best marks on the Pirates’ starting staff by a fair amount.
But good things aren’t happening for the Pirates right now, no matter who’s on the mound. Brubaker got hit hard early in his start and then again late in his start, and the Pirates’ offense was once again near-silent as they lost to the Milwaukee Brewers, 7-2, their fifth straight defeat.
To be fair to Brubaker, with the way the Pirates’ offense is going right now, any starting pitcher has almost no margin for error. At the same time, Brubaker was far from perfect.
He struck out the first batter of the game on three pitches, then induced a groundout just in front of the plate from Brewers outfielder Christian Yelich. The third batter, however, Willy Adames, sent a 1-1 slider 430 feet over the notch in left center. Brubaker hung the pitch and was punished for it.
He made a similarly appetizing pitch in a 3-1 count against Brewers infielder Jace Peterson in the second inning. Peterson hit it even harder, crushing a 450-foot homer off the batter’s eye in dead center. Two batters later, outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr., got Brubaker once again. This time it was a change-up off the plate, not a particularly bad pitch, and he ripped it to left center, bouncing it off the top of the wall and into the Brewers’ bullpen for the third home run in two innings.
The right-hander did settle down after that, allowing just one baserunner on a walk in the next three innings, but got beat up again in the sixth, giving up a leadoff single, another single and eventually a two-run triple to Tyrone Taylor to make it a 5-1 game at the time.
Brubaker’s relative struggles Friday are more notable because the Pirates’ lack of offense has become the norm. During this five-game losing streak, the Pirates have scored a combined six runs. They have totaled six or fewer hits in each of those losses. On the season, they have scored three or fewer runs in 49 of their 81 games, or 60.4% of the time.
If there is a bright side on that side of things, it’s in the top of the order. Center fielder Bryan Reynolds showed that again, hitting a 436-foot solo home run in the eighth inning. It’s his 15th homer and 46th RBI of the year, as he remains near the tops in baseball for OPS, on-base percentage and fWAR. He finished 2 for 4 on the night, with a first-inning double to boot.
But once again, as one would assume from a 7-2 loss with five hits, the rest of the offense was quiet.
To add insult to injury, the Pirates’ bullpen, which was so good early in the season, has struggled recently, too. This time it was right-hander Kyle Crick, who gave up a walk, an RBI single and a wild pitch to allow two runs in the ninth.
Really, everything has spiraled for the Pirates. It’s easy, at the halfway mark of the season, to forget that they started the season 12-13 through April. Since then, they are 17-39.
At some point, the losing streak will stop, but the fact that Brubaker, their best starter, couldn’t twirl some magic to make it happen himself makes things even more gloomy than they normally would be.
