SAN DIEGO -- Losers of nine straight games and 11 of their last 12, the Pirates have struggled to create a formula that translates to success. This ongoing streak of setbacks has been highlighted by inconsistent play in one area or another on a given night.
At times during this recent stretch, the offense has done its job only to see the pitching staff let a late lead slip away. Then there have been the instances where serviceable pitching performances -- like the ones Jake Woodford and Luis Ortiz provided the last two nights -- were wasted by the offense's inability to push runs across. Everything hasn't clicked all at once. Nonetheless, it's all led to results similar to the latest loss, 3-0 to the Padres Tuesday night at Petco Park.
"We're in a rough patch and I think the biggest thing is execution on both sides of the ball," Ke'Bryan Hayes said. "In any game, whoever is able to execute more is going to win the game and that's been the biggest thing collectively on both sides, especially on the offensive side. We haven't been able to get that big hit to get runs in."
As they've done seven times against prior opponents in losing efforts over the last two weeks, the Pirates out-hit the Padres, 9-7, and still managed to finish with a goose egg on the scoreboard. They left eight runners on base and went 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position. They had a runner reach third in the second, seventh and eighth innings only to fail in producing any form of run support to keep pace with a Padres team that scored their runs on a first-inning sacrifice fly, a fifth-inning homer by David Peralta and an eighth-inning RBI single by Manny Machado.
In all three innings where a runner was 90 feet away from scoring, strikeouts ended it. There were plenty of those to go around, as all but two players in the lineup finished with two strikeouts. In total, the Pirates -- ranked among the top-five teams with the most strikeouts (1,107) in baseball -- struck out 15 times, the first 10 of which belonged to San Diego starter Michael King, who scattered seven hits over six scoreless innings.
"He executed pitches. I think that was the thing. He executed pitches throughout the whole thing," Derek Shelton said. "As we talked about, even when we were back in Pittsburgh, you get into their bullpen and you're going to see electric stuff, and we did."
But what could the Pirates have done differently to adjust to King?
"I think today it would have been tough early in the game," Shelton said. "I think King's stuff was that good. For the right-handers, they would have had to have pushed him all the way over the plate to the other outer-third, and he executed today. He pitched well."
Hayes lauded King for his effort, too.
"I think (King) had some good stuff tonight. I don't think there's too much we could have changed, I feel like we got swings off. Maybe we could have been a little more aggressive earlier in the counts. I think that's one of the things we did well against them last time," Hayes said. "When you have games like that, you come out the next day and you really have to figure out how to get the ball in play with two strikes."
The Pirates haven't faced King in every game during this losing streak, though. And more often than not, the strikeouts were piling up way before King started dealing Tuesday night. Since that loss in Houston that prompted this rapid descent, the Pirates have struck out a total of 128 times in 12 games. They've posted six games with 11 or more strikeouts and three with 15 or more.
Adding to it, there were plenty of poor swing decisions made on this particular night. Andrew McCutchen and Rowdy Tellez had at-bats where they went chasing fastballs up and out of the zone against King and Isiah Kiner-Falefa couldn't make contact on a pair of inside pitches in two-strike counts. Bryan De La Cruz, who has struggled mightily with 17 strikeouts in 42 at-bats since joining the Pirates ahead of the trade deadline, was fooled on two separate occasions as well. He couldn't make contact on a 2-2 sinker way inside from King in the fourth and was absolutely fooled on a 2-2 changeup out of the zone from Jason Adam in the seventh:
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"We've got to have better at-bats. We've got to have better at-bats with runners in scoring position," Shelton said. "We had some opportunities. We had some opportunities last night. We've just not been capitalizing on them."
"I think when you're in stretches like this and when you've lost games in a row, a lot of guys want to be the guy to get that big hit or something like that," Hayes said. "For us, we've just got to figure out how to get back to our game, which is being aggressive early, trying to hit line drives and taking our walks whenever we push them out of the zone. More than anything, we've got to figure out how to, in a way, single them to death. I feel like we're at our best when we're doing that."
Prior to Tuesday's ninth straight loss, Joey Bart expressed how hard a stretch like this can be for a team. It's certainly difficult to win games at the major-league level, and it doesn't make losing any easier, but the players inside the Pirates' clubhouse are still hopeful a change in fortunes is coming soon.
“It’s like when you’re winning, you feel like you can’t lose, and when you’re losing, you feel like you can’t win," Bart said. "All it comes down to is catching a break or someone coming up and having a big swing. We just haven’t had that. We haven’t caught those breaks and we haven’t finished games offensively and on the pitching end. It’s really easy to spiral out of control and really worry about, ‘Hey we haven’t won any games,’ but if we can stick to the process and continue to try to clean everything up, hopefully someone comes up with that big hit or someone punches a guy out in a big situation. Usually those are the things that catalyst wins. It’s obviously been tough, but these guys in here -- as you guys have seen all year -- we fight, we claw around and find ways to win. It will come to an end soon.”
