CHICAGO — Max Kranick was not perfect Wednesday night against the Chicago White Sox.
The Pirates right-hander, making his sixth-career start in the majors, cruised through the first two innings, then fought through the third. He allowed a three-run homer to Gavin Sheets in the fourth to put the Pirates in a three-run hole.
But Kranick hung in there. After giving up a leadoff single in the fifth, he forced a fielder’s choice out. Then he gave up a one-out walk. The next batter, Yasmani Grandal, should have been the final out of the inning. It would have been a nice, clean five-inning, three-run outing against one of the best lineups in baseball.
Instead, Grandal’s at-bat swung things against Kranick.
He ripped a sharp grounder to Pirates first baseman Colin Moran deep behind the bag. Moran turned and flipped it down to Kevin Newman covering second for one out. Grandal is a slow runner, so Newman had plenty of time to fire it back to Kranick, who was covering first, for the inning-ending double play. Instead, Newman sent it sailing wide of Kranick. One run scored then before Kranick exited the game after permitting another single.
Left-handed reliever Anthony Banda came in to relieve him and couldn’t slam the door, allowing one more run. In the end, Kranick was given a 4 2/3 inning, five-run outing in an eventual 6-3 Pirates loss.
If one were still holding out hope for the Pirates to pick up some wins down the stretch of the season, that error from Newman was especially frustrating given the way the game progressed.
The Pirates had scratched across one run on an RBI single from right fielder Cole Tucker in the fifth. Left fielder Anthony Alford then smoked a ball 430 feet to left center field in the seventh for the Pirates second run.
In the eighth, Tucker doubled, then scored on a single from catcher Jacob Stallings. Had Newman thrown accurately to first for the would-be double play in the fifth, it would have kept it a 3-1 game at the time. The two runs the Pirates scored later could have tied the game.
The White Sox ended up scoring another run on Sheets’ second long ball of the game, so that would have broken the tie in this thought experiment, but nonetheless, Newman’s mistake didn’t just saddle Kranick with a worse line than he should have had, but actually put the game too far out of reach for a late-inning rally to matter in the slightest.
Even still, one can be encouraged by Kranick’s outing. Just like right-hander Bryse Wilson’s start against the White Sox on Tuesday, Kranick was fairly efficient and mostly effective against the potent White Sox order. Perhaps Wilson was better all around, but it was a step in the right direction for Kranick.
That’s especially good given that Kranick scuffled in his previous four starts in the majors. After throwing five perfect innings against the St. Louis Cardinals in his debut, he failed to pitch more than four innings in any one start except one the rest of the way. Even in his one deeper outing, against the Milwaukee Brewers, he allowed 10 hits and six earned runs. That can hardly be classified as a good outing.
So it is encouraging that Kranick could string together three scoreless innings to begin this game against the White Sox. The three-run homer in the fourth was a tough one to allow, but he did bounce back and finish that inning without more damage. Then he got into some trouble in the fifth and did everything he could to get out of it.
He just couldn’t do it alone, and Newman couldn’t help him. So the moral victory here becomes more abstract, as Kranick’s raw numbers from the outing are damaged. And there was no actual victory, either, as the Pirates were swept in their two-game series against the White Sox and took their fourth loss in the last five games.
