The Pirates' three-game winning streak came to a halt with Friday's 8-6 loss to the Diamondbacks. Just as the team's momentum from a sweep of the Dodgers was thwarted with the loss, so was JT Brubaker's momentum after a month of May where he had shown signs of possibly turning a corner.
Brubaker's final line wasn't pretty. He pitched four-plus innings, allowing six runs (five earned) on eight hits with one walk and three strikeouts. The downfall of the night came via the long ball, as Arizona mashed three home runs off Brubaker.
These weren't cheap homers either. Christian Walker's homer to lead off the second inning traveled 420 feet. Alek Thomas' fourth-inning blast went 432 feet. Ketel Marte then broke a 3-3 tie in the fifth with a 112.6-mph laser that cleared the Clemente wall.
After a stretch of a few promising starts, Brubaker regressed back to some issues that hampered him last season. Derek Shelton is a but more optimistic that this is just a temporary setback.
"I look at it as a rough night," Shelton said. "His last three outings, he's actually thrown the ball pretty well. But today, he left balls up in the zone and because of it we paid for it."
"Bad nights are going to happen, but it's different when bad nights happen when you're ahead in counts or you're in the zone," Brubaker said. "I was behind, working my way back into counts. I just wasn't putting myself in a good position to put the guys away or really attack them."
Specifically, the slider caused problems for Brubaker. On the homers to Walker and Thomas, Brubaker hung flat sliders to both of them and didn't get away with the mistakes.
"I wasn't really getting it down in the zone," Brubaker said. "There was kind of more side-to-side movement than up-and-down movement. Just two bad pitches. ... Mistake pitches get hit a long way."
For some pitchers, it takes adjustments in a number of different areas in order to improve. With Brubaker, there is undoubtedly room for growth, but there seems to be one key issue that is the catalyst for stagnated development, and that reared its ugly head once again on Friday.
"His stuff was up in the zone which prompted a lot of fly balls," Shelton said. "It just shows he's not at his best when the ball is in the air that much."
The long ball haunted Brubaker last season, as he surrendered 28 home runs. It doesn't take much digging into the numbers to see where Brubaker needs to improve the most in order to take the next step in becoming a more consistent Major League starter.
Last year, Brubaker had a 42.8 ground ball percentage. Heading into Friday's action, Brubaker's 43.2 ground ball percentage ranked 60th among big league starters with at least 40 innings.
As Shelton mentioned, Brubaker had been in better form over his past few starts, especially his last two outings where he went a combined 11 2/3 innings without allowing an earned run and had a not-great-but-better 47.5 ground ball percentage. Even in his May 17 loss to the Cubs at Wrigley Field, he struck out 10 batters in 5 2/3 innings of work. Most importantly, Brubaker had only allowed five home runs heading into Friday night, not allowing more than one in an outing. Even without his best stuff earlier this season, Brubaker was able to avoid the big fly.
There were lessons to be learned on Friday, some that could have kept the game a bit closer for a Pirates team that fought back in the late innings once again. That just makes this loss a little tougher to swallow.
"I think we learned lessons from usage, knowing that the slider wasn't great that maybe we could have gone to another place," Shelton said. "I think overall the message is you've been throwing the ball really well and you had an outing where the ball was up in the zone a lot."
