Joe Musgrove leads Pirates to 'Strange' win over Padres
The Pittsburgh Pirates and San Diego Padres entered Friday night’s game with the two worst team ERAs in the majors in June.
So, of course, they engaged in a pitcher’s duel.
Jose Osuna drove in pinch runner Steven Brault for the go-ahead run in the seventh inning, and the Pirates won 2-1 for their third victory in the past four games.
Joe Musgrove and Eric Lauer each pitched seven strong innings and combined for just one walk. Musgrove (5-7) allowed one earned run on five hits.
It was fitting the winning run was unearned during a 2-hour, 35-minute nine-inning game that was the second-shortest at PNC Park all season.
“It was a really crisp ballgame,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle said, “and a couple errors got in the way and got in play and helped change the direction.”
On the winning run, Jung Ho Kang advanced to second base after a grounder to third with one out in the seventh. Manny Machado committed a fielding and throwing error during the sequence, and Hurdle sent in Brault to run for Kang.
If this was hockey, Machado — the $300 million man — would have had an “even” plus-minus for the game since he accounted for the Padres’ lone run with a homer to center that led off the fourth.
That was one of four extra-base hits allowed by Musgrove, a San Diego native who has won all three of his starts against his hometown team. But other than when Machado jogged past it, no Padres runner touched third base against Musgrove, much to the delight of the second-biggest crowd of the season at PNC Park (33,437).
Some might have been drawn to the ballpark by a “Stranger Things” promotion that tied in with the Netflix series.
Indeed, the big crowd saw some strange things. Despite the strong pitching lines and lack of runs, many balls were tagged hard all game. Eight of the 11 hardest-hit balls (via exit velocity, according to Statcast) went for outs, and 13 of the 15 balls that traveled the farthest, per Statcast, also were long outs.
The average exit velocity against Musgrove was 88.1 mph. Against Lauer (5-7), it was 86.8 mph.
“It was a strange game to start with, and, I guess, on a perfectly (appropriate) night,” Hurdle said.
“It was just weird out of the box.”
The Pirates’ only extra-base hit was a double by Starling Marte on Lauer’s fourth pitch in the first inning. It scored Bryan Reynolds, who had singled.
At that point, things couldn’t have been going better for the Pirates, as Musgrove struck out the side in the top of the first. But Marte was tagged out at third, and the Pirates didn’t record another hit until Elias Diaz’s two-out single in the fifth. Diaz also was the only player to draw a walk against Lauer (in the third).
The Pirates entered the game with a 5.90 team ERA since June 1. The only team worse in that span was San Diego at 6.32. The teams combined to allow one earned run, 13 hits and three walks Friday.
Neither team put two runners on base at the same time until the Padres eighth, when Greg Garcia led off with a pinch-hit bunt single and Kyle Crick walked consecutive batters with two outs.
But Crick got Franmil Reyes to foul out to first baseman Josh Bell to end the threat, allowing Felipe Vazquez to earn a save for the second consecutive game and 18th time this season.
“The energy was incredible tonight,” said Musgrove, who was on seven days rest after a peculiar two-starts-in-four-days week in Atlanta. “Been a while since we’ve seen the stadium like that — and quite frankly, it’s been a while since we’ve had a starter go seven and have Crick take the eighth and ‘Flip’ throw the ninth. So all around, it was an incredible game.”
Love baseball? Stay up-to-date with the latest Pittsburgh Pirates news.
Chris Adamski is a TribLive reporter who has covered primarily the Pittsburgh Steelers since 2014 following two seasons on the Penn State football beat. A Western Pennsylvania native, he joined the Trib in 2012 after spending a decade covering Pittsburgh sports for other outlets. He can be reached at cadamski@triblive.com.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.