Saturday, May 19, 2007
Ronny Paulino slides safely past the tag of Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero in the fifth inning last night at PNC Park.
By Dejan Kovacevic
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
For a strikeout pitcher, Doug Davis is blessed with neither overwhelming velocity nor exceptional breaking stuff. But he does have a maddening knack for getting hitters to swing at pretty much whatever he throws, no matter its location.
A week ago, he and his ilk were the free-swinging Pirates' worst enemy.
Not anymore, apparently.
An all-through-the-lineup patient approach, seldom seen before this week, resulted in 14 hits, four walks, three-run home runs by Xavier Nady and Ryan Doumit and, ultimately, an 11-5 dunking of the Arizona Diamondbacks last night before 32,682 at PNC Park.
Davis gave up seven of those runs and was chased in the fifth inning.
Pitch count: 101.
"What's happening right now at the plate for us is the way you see a successful baseball team perform," manager Jim Tracy said. "Look at all our big hits tonight. Look how many came in deep counts. Look how many came after two outs. You become a better hitter when you take pitches you can't hit, and when you swing at the ones you can hit."
Everything seems to follow from there.
The Pirates have walked 25 times in six games since Sunday, the day after a 50-minute, closed-door meeting in which Tracy and hitting coach Jeff Manto urged all position players to be more patient, more selective at the plate. That average of 4.2 walks per game is a sweeping upgrade on the 2.57 mark of the first 35 games.
It surely is no coincidence, then, that the offense has broken out for 44 runs in these six games, an eye-popping average of 7.3.
Nor that the eruption last night included a 5-for-15 tally with runners in scoring position and 10 of the 11 RBIs coming after two outs.
Can it continue?
"Each night, there's a different plan," Manto said. "Some pitchers, you don't want to let too many pitches go by. But our word on Davis was that he was spraying the ball a little, and we needed to be patient. That's what we were."
What has changed?
"I don't think our approaches have changed," he said. "I think the results have changed."
Starter Ian Snell delivers against the Diamondbacks last night. He gave up four runs on seven hits and struck out seven for his fourth win.
Ian Snell failed to achieve seven innings for just the third time in his nine starts, lasting 52/3 and getting charged with four runs. But, in something that is becoming strangely common, it did not matter much because of all the offense.
The Pirates made Davis toil from the outset and, in the third inning, it paid off. Freddy Sanchez singled on the sixth pitch he saw, Jason Bay followed suit on his third pitch, and Nady worked the count full before ramming a high, flat fastball above the Clemente Wall for his fifth home run and a 3-0 lead.
Nady, carrying a 3-for-24 slump into this one, had a sharply struck single, too.
"I've felt good at the plate the past few days, mostly because I feel I've been swinging at quality pitches," he said. "It's all about pitch selection."
Tracy saw it the same way.
"He stayed off some tough pitches in that at-bat," Tracy said. "He was chasing some of those early in the season."
The fifth inning brought an even greater output through mostly the same approach.
Jose Bautista and Sanchez opened by drawing walks, then took second and third on a wild pitch. Bay and Nady, in a bit of a flashback, struck out by fishing at offerings well out of the zone.
But Adam LaRoche, the Pirates' leader with 23 walks, took his count to 2-1 before lashing a two-run single up the middle.
Ronny Paulino singled off a 1-1 count. Even Jose Castillo, the freest of free swingers, took a pitch before his single drove in another run. Snell's first-pitch single made it 7-0, and Davis was lifted.
Arizona, also struggling on offense most of the season, scored four times against Snell in the sixth. There nearly was more once Jonah Bayliss had replaced him: Robby Hammock's single to right field had Carlos Quentin trying to score from second, but Nady's no-hop bullet to Paulino nailed him at the plate to end the inning.
"That was huge," Tracy said. "The momentum was shifting the other way."
The Diamondbacks added to that shift with another run in the seventh to pull within 7-5, but the Pirates answered in the bottom half of the inning. LaRoche doubled -- on a full count -- took third on a passed ball and scored on Castillo's groundout.
LaRoche's average is up to .203, the result of a 15-for-42 awakening in the past 13 games.
To top if off, pinch-hitter Doumit's home run, his third of the season, tacked on three runs in the eighth.
That came on a full count, too.
"A great, pinch-hit, major-league at-bat," Tracy called it.
Matt Capps and Salomon Torres finished it off by retiring all seven batters they faced.
Tom Gorzelanny, 5-2 with a 2.36 ERA, pitches tonight as the Pirates try for their first three-game winning streak since taking five in a row April 24-27.
(Dejan Kovacevic can be reached at dkovacevic@post-gazette.com.)
No comments:
Post a Comment