MILWAUKEE -- The turbulent season for Chad Kuhl reached an bizarre destination Saturday.
Kuhl pitched the first 3 ⅓ innings of the Pirates’ 7-4 loss to the Brewers in the second game of the series at American Family Field. Like a few too many of his appearances this season, Kuhl’s was shaky to start and ended with an uncomfortable exit in the early goings.
“You have to have a really short memory when it comes to games like this,” Kuhl said.
Kuhl was coming off his best start, after which he made reference to some mechanical changes that allowed him to command the ball much, much better. But after another difficult outing Saturday, Kuhl had a curious thought about why that command vanished once again: The ball.
He likened the actual baseball to a difficult-to-grip pearl. Kuhl also claimed that this was the reason that Burnes wasn’t as sharp as he’s been in previous starts this season, and provided this as an excuse for the 11 walks from Pirates pitching in Friday night’s loss in the series opener.
“They were bad. We've had bad baseballs for the first part of the year. They were really super-chalky,” Kuhl said. “Tough to get your stuff to spin and stuff like that with pearls, with brand-new baseballs. We're going to struggle with it tomorrow unless something changes.”
It’s an interesting theory to ponder as MLB begins to crack down on pitcher’s using grip-enhancing substances. But Kuhl, who claimed to have tossed aside at least 10 baseballs during his outing, maintained that this was an unrelated issue.
“I think it was just a bad batch. I think it's nothing to do with that,” he said. “It's just, we had a bad couple batches of baseballs the past couple days. They've been pretty much pearls.”
Kuhl is not exactly the world’s most reliable witness on this issue. Not Corbin Burnes, nor Josh Hader nor Chase De Jong, nor anybody else that threw a pitch in this series mentioned anything about this type of issue. Maybe it’s just bad luck, but a one-day cause for a problem that’s actually persisted throughout most of Kuhl’s career is suspicious to say the least.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility, obviously. But in order for this to really gain traction, there should probably be at least one testimonial from a pitcher whose career walk rate is a little better than 4.03 per nine innings.
THE ACTION
The Pirates were once again bitten by the big inning at American Family Field to drop their sixth consecutive game and fall to 23-40 this season.
After jumping out to a four-run lead against one of the game’s better pitchers in Burnes, Kuhl and the Pirates lost control all at once. The right-hander made his own mess in the fourth, and Shelton left him to clean it up. But the 2018 National League MVP proved too difficult a task to manage.
Christian Yelich stayed back on a first-pitch sinker from Kuhl and hit a tailing drive to the warning track in left field that fell for a three-run, go-ahead double -- though it seemed Ka’ai Tom should have had a better shot at it. It was the second consecutive night that the Brewers put together a five-run inning. This time on four hits, punctuated by the Yelich double, and a pair of walks.
Some more damage was done against Clay Holmes, who allowed an RBI double to Willy Adames and an run-scoring single to Omar Narvaez, to finish the frame.
There was never a moment in which the Pirates were truly out of the game. But they failed to produce with runners on base, going 2 for 16 in that situation in the contest. It was a tremendous departure from when they simply BABIP’d one of the game’s best pitchers into submission in the first two innings.
Adam Frazier started the game with the first of his three hits in the contest, which allowed him to match Nick Castellanos of the Reds for the MLB lead with 83 hits this season.
Phillip Evans followed with a bloop single to right and Bryan Reynolds plated them both on a strange play in which Burnes made an ill-advised stop with his foot before proceeding to bounce his throw to first into right field.
Jacob Stallings then followed Colin Moran’s walk with a run-scoring double play.
Brewers right fielder Jace Peterson had a forgettable day defensively. He made an unwise sliding attempt on an Erik Gonzalez blooper that eventually landed for a triple.
Then Peterson struggled to dig Tom’s grounder out of the corner which gave the Pirates their first instance of back-to-back triples since 2018.
Chris Stratton, Chasen Shreve and Rich Rodriguez kept the Brewers off the board for the final four innings, but the Pirates failed to capitalize on many offensive threats and did not score after the second inning.
THE REAL STORY
There are a lot of players on the Pirates’ audition stage during a season with tapered expectations.
Among those on the bubble at this point are just about every single hurler that’s thrown a pitch in the first inning this season.
The club finally proved that they’re not afraid to hold players accountable regardless of their draft status, prospect pedigree or general talent. Some family business was settled when the Pirates optioned Mitch Keller to Class AAA Indianapolis on Saturday.
That move signaled that they’re going to do everything they can to try and see if Keller can be a part of the new wave, should this rebuild actually work out.
Keller was the youngest and most gifted starter the Pirates have rostered this year. JT Brubaker has had the most success this season out of that group, and is the likeliest to keep getting chances to establish himself in the majors beyond this season.
But Kuhl is a starter whose future with the organization is, at the very least, in doubt. He was one of a number of homegrown talents that had to deal with injuries and poor performance and just has not figured it out.
Kuhl, off his best outing of the season, came to a ballpark which he’s had a ton of success throughout his career. The Pirates were 8-0 in Kuhl-pitched games against the Brewers before Saturday, and Kuhl himself had been 3-0 with a 2.45 ERA in five starts in Milwaukee -- whatever they call this place now.
As it stands, Kuhl is moving further from Keller and Brubaker’s end of the bubble. He’ll get his chances. Plenty of them. But throughout his five years in the big leagues and all the injury trouble, Kuhl has shown little command of the strike zone. The issue persists through most every start, and certainly showed itself Saturday.
“You can not give away free pitches, you can’t give away free outs and we did, just because of the fact that we did not command the baseball,” Derek Shelton said.
Kuhl split his four walks in half during Saturday’s outing. The first two did not lead to damage in the opening inning, while the others resulted in Milwaukee runs during that fifth-inning rally. But he missed the zone far too often, not just on Ball four, as only 50 of his 93 pitches landed for strikes.
“It wasn’t all bad, right?” Kuhl said. “It's just one bad inning.”
Kuhl’s record dipped to 0-4 and ERA leaps to 6.52, he and the Pirates have had to try harder to mine for positives in these outings. But now, three starts removed from a six-week stint on the injured list, Kuhl has to do more to show he’s worth the project, let alone be part of what lies on the other side of the rebuild.
THE THOUGHTS
• After the five-run fourth, the game seemed out of reach for the Pirates. Although it definitely should not have.
The Pirates threatened with the bases loaded in the fifth to chase Burnes before Gregory Polanco, Gonzalez and Tom each struck out to end the threat. Kuhl, Frazier and Evans also struck out in succession to strand a runner at third in the second. Evans whiffed to leave two on base in the fourth. Moran did the same in the sixth.
And from there the three-run deficit seemed like a much tougher hill to climb.
“We couldn’t make contact,” Shelton said. “We’ve got to make adjustments there. We had some situations there to score runs. We got the back-end of their bullpen, but we’ve got to be better and we have to find a way to put the ball in play.”
After relying a lot on the home run -- the return of Ke’Bryan Hayes will do that -- in the first game of the series and much of the previous homestand, the Pirates returned to their contact-oriented approach in the first two innings Saturday. But the failures to capitalize in the middle frames show the pitfalls of that strategy.
• Perhaps Kuhl’s theory about the baseballs led to Holmes’ struggles in the two games of the Brewers series following a stretch of 17 consecutive scoreless outings. But he had the opportunity to blow the whistle on that and did not say a word -- Kuhl’s Zoom call was after Holmes.
So, without that incredibly unsafe net to trapeze above, Holmes just pointed to a failure to land the sinker and slider that has revitalized his career.
“You’ve got to have the good stuff,” Holmes said. “I’ve got to execute my sinker down to get ahead in counts and be able to make it pitch to two strikes. I think that I’ve put together some good outings, so I have something to go back in and look on. I think I know what’s going on, so I’m excited to go to work and do some things that I do well and make sure that I capitalize on them as best I can.”
It was a bold decision to go back to Holmes after Friday night’s implosion. But it was a worthwhile gamble for Shelton to make considering how important he and just about everyone else in the bullpen has been to a club with mostly disappointing starting pitching.
And it was good to hear Shelton finally start to bemoan the starters’ inability to go deep into games and provide too much of a burden for the members of the bullpen, like Holmes, to carry.
“Our starters have got to give us more innings,” Shelton said. “We’ve got to get deeper into games with our starters. That’s extremely important because of the workload stuff with our bullpen guys.”
• It wouldn’t be a Pirates game without some weird stuff happening.
Outside of Burnes’ kick save in the opening inning, Gonzalez had to deal with a knuckler off the bat of former Pirates Pablo Reyes that was hit directly at him but ricocheted off his leg and kicked into center field. Not to be outdone, Reynolds made an unnecessarily aggressive throw to second base to prevent Reyes, who threw on the breaks well before the bag, from advancing. Of course, the ball got away from Frazier and Reyes ended up on third on a line drive to the shortstop.
"It caught me off-guard," Gonzalez said through team interpreter Mike Gonzalez. "However, that’s just things that happen in the game."
Although this doesn’t at all measure up to Will Craig’s blunder and Hayes missing first base on the homer, it’s easy to point fingers at management and coaching when these strange things keep happening. But if you work at NASA, you should know where the stars are. This is the major leagues. There are expectations for baseline knowledge that is not covered on a daily or even basis.
These aren’t fundamentals. It’s just weird stuff happening to a bad team.
THE ESSENTIALS
Boxscore
Scoreboard
Standings
Statistics
THE LINEUPS
Shelton's card:
Adam Frazier, 2B
Phillip Evans, 3B
Bryan Reynolds, CF
Colin Moran, 1B
Jacob Stallings, C
Gregory Polanco, RF
Erik Gonzalez, SS
Ka'ai Tom, LF
Chad Kuhl, P
And for Craig Counsell's Brewers:
Jace Peterson, RF
Daniel Vogelbach, 1B
Christian Yelich, LF
Willy Adames, SS
Omar Narvaez, C
Daniel Robertson, 2B
Jackie Bradley Jr., CF
Pablo Reyes, 3B
Corbin Burnes, P
THE SCHEDULE
The Pirates wrap up the series in Milwaukee on Sunday afternoon before headed to Washington for a three-game set with Josh Bell and the Nationals. First pitch for the finale is scheduled for 2:10 with Wil Crowe making his return to the rotation against Adrian Houser.
IN THE SYSTEM
• Perhaps the hottest hitter in all the minor leagues, Oneil Cruz is showing no signs of slowing down for Altoona. After a mammoth blast Friday night, he homered again during a 3 for 3 performance in the nightcap of the Class AA squad's doubleheader. The blast was the eighth of the year for Cruz, who's hit three in the past four games. His performance has even impressed the big-league manager.
"It makes me smile," Shelton said. "There’s a lot of things going on in player development that are part of our future and part of what’s going to make the Pirates good."
It's a day that ends in y which means @OneilCruz4 has homered again.
— Altoona Curve (@AltoonaCurve) June 13, 2021
We lead it 3-2 in the 5th. pic.twitter.com/vY7GcfMCyk
• Hudson Head doubled and drew a pair of walks for Bradenton. The 20-year-old improved his on-base percentage to .394 with the effort. It's been an interesting season for Head, who could eventually be the best outfield prospect in the system. He's batting just .189 but he's drawn 27 walks in just 30 games this season. Head was part of the deal that sent Joe Musgrove to the Padres.
• Affiliate scores
• Indianapolis
• Altoona
• Greensboro
• Bradenton
THE CONTENT
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