Game 14: Duke Feeds His Gopher

21 Apr 2010

Zach Duke was unable to move to 3-0 on the year. He suffered through his toughest start of the young season. In five innings he gave up seven runs, seven hits and three walks. Three of those hits cleared the fences on the fly.

Ryan Braun kick started it with a solo dinger in the first. Rickie Weeks hit a two run homer during a three run fifth that made the score 5-0. Former Pirate Jody Gerut hit a two run shot of his own in the sixth. Game. Set. Match.

The flip side was Yovani Gallardo. He was pulled after five shutout innings during which he struck out 10 Pirate hitters. The Milaukee bullpen tossed four inning of shutout ball to finish the deed.

The Good
Andrew McCutchen walked and stole two bases.

The Pirates bullpen also tossed four innings of one run ball.

One of the players acquired last year for Adam LaRoche – Argenis Diaz – was recalled from AAA to provide some help at 3B with both Andy LaRoche and Bobby Crosby nicked up. Diaz is a good glove/no bat kind of ball player. In nearly 1600 career minor league at bats, he hit six home runs. So, he has a little more power than say, Frank Taveras. So, that’s good. He grounded out to LaTroy Hawkins

The Bad
Losing. Being .500. Me thinking that the high point of the season was Sunday night when the team was 7-5.

The Rest
Gallardo hadn’t beaten the Pirates since 4/29/09. He was 0-1 in his previous three starts.

This was the second time in 2010 that the Pirates had been struck out ten or more times by the opposition’s starting pitcher.

Baseball-Reference.com was unable to come up with an incident in which an opponent faced the Pirates and whiffed 10 or more hitters while only pitching 5 innings. Closest was Jon Leiber (former Bucco) then with the Cubs who fanned 10 in 5-1/3 back on 7/5/1999.

Such an incident happened to other teams twice on the same date last year. On 10/4/09 both Vicente Padilla (against Colorado) and Ryan Dempster (against Arizona) whiffed 10 while only tossing five innings.

Braun came into the came hitting below his career average against the Pirates. He collected three hits to pull his average on the year to almost .400.