It’s early for the Pittsburgh Pirates to go full Col. Hannibal Smith from the “A-Team.” But in terms of the club’s starting rotation, don’t you just “love it when a plan comes together”? For one series, anyway, that just happened.
And for a franchise whose best laid plans so often go astray, it was enjoyable to see them manifest for at least one weekend against a division rival. On Sunday, the Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs 3-2 behind a strong start from Mitch Keller. The club took three of four at Wrigley Field, providing a snapshot of what the organization had been hoping this rotation would look like by roughly this point in the season.
Especially since last year’s first-round pick, Paul Skenes, is now up with the big league club and Jared Jones has proved to be more than worthy of staying up after making his Major League Baseball debut at the end of March. In the four games at Wrigley, the Pirates starters — Jones, Skenes, Bailey Falter and Keller — combined to allow only five runs over 25 2⁄3 innings against a Cubs lineup that posted 21 runs just a week earlier during a three-game series between the teams at PNC Park. Not only that, but the combined strikeout-to-walk ratio for the four starters was 23:6.
For Jones and Skenes specifically to open the first two games of the series, it was 18:1. Skenes left his start on Friday after six innings with a no-hit shutout intact, and Falter tossed seven and two-thirds innings of three-hit shutout ball on Satu.
