PITTSBURGH — Tyler Glasnow may have turned a corner.
After a terrible first outing, Glasnow fought back to put something of a respectable performance last week at Wrigley Field.
Against the New York Yankees on Friday, Glasnow finally put together a start worthy of his pedigree, going five innings and allowing three runs. Just one of those was scored as earned and even that decision was questionable, as two of the Pirates’ three fielding errors ended up being involved in the scoring.
Glasnow was, if not great, certainly good enough. He left runners on first and second in the first inning with a looking strikeout of Aaron Judge.
But it was in the second inning when Glasnow’s performance really seemed to take a step forward. He walked Brett Gardner to lead off and then Chase Headley’s double scored Gardner after a Jose Osuna error. Headley was at third with no outs and the meat of the order coming up.
Glasnow got Starlin Castro to ground out, walked Jacoby Ellsbury, gave up a stolen base to Ellsbury, got Judge to ground out and was facing Greg Bird with two on and two outs. To that point, it was a pretty typical Glasnow inning. Two walks, a stolen base, not a ton of hard contact and probably way too many pitches.
After falling behind Bird on a changeup that missed, Glasnow challenged him with a fastball. Bird just hammered it. Luckily for Glasnow, it went just outside of the right-field foul pole. Statcast doesn’t give data for foul balls, but it was crushed. The Pirates Charities sign was the only thing that kept the ball out of the Allegheny River.
At that moment, everything was going wrong for Glasnow, and especially the things that can’t go wrong for Glasnow. He’d walked two batters. He’d given up a stolen base. His pitch count was out of control, and his best pitch — his fastball — had just gotten smoked.
He went right back to it.
Glasnow’s next pitch was in nearly the same location and he got Bird to swing and miss. The next pitch, he pulled the string on the curveball for s strikeout. Glasnow went on to pitch another 1.2 innings and thanks to some poor defense and his elevated pitch count, that was as far as he could get. He also said that all day, he wasn’t particularly comfortable with his changeup or the command of his fastball.
But the sequence against Bird showed Glasnow exactly where he needs to be, especially on a night where not everything is going right.
“I don’t want to get away from that,” he said. “I think when my timing’s not there and all of that and things might not be as sharp, I still don’t want to get away from my strengths. I was obviously not super happy with how the guys got on, but definitely getting out of those innings and giving the team a chance to win is what I’m looking for, so it was good.”
Glasnow has the stuff to be a top-of-the-rotation starter. He’s clearly not there yet, but in the meantime, he can be a lot more effective as a back-of-the-rotation starter if he can keep one bad inning or one bad sequence or even one bad pitch from carrying into the rest of his outing.
“When the timing’s not there, I think he biggest thing is you just have to brush all the stuff aside and just compete,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you have your timing or rhythm. You just have to do what you got to do.”
Glasnow didn’t have a lot of other good things to say about his start, despite it clearly being the best of his three. But manager Clint Hurdle was encouraged by the way Glasnow had his curveball working both in the zone and out of the zone to keep from constantly falling behind without crisp fastball command.
“The curveball helped,” Hurdle said. “That’s going to be one of his m.o.’s. You have to be around the zone to get swings. So there’s an opportunity there. He wasn’t sharp. He didn’t have the stuff he had at Wrigley by any means. The fastball showed up later. The curveball played throughout. The changeup wasn’t a factor like it was at Wrigley. So he had to go out there pretty much with two pitches.”
OSUNA DEBUT
Jose Osuna made his PNC Park debut and got it off to a terrific start, tripling in his first at-bat. He finished 1 for 3 with a walk and a run and looked very comfortable against C.C. Sabathia.
“That felt really good,” he said. “First hit in the majors, you know, and we won the game. That’s the most important thing. … I was so happy when I hit the ball and I saw the ball going and going. I said, ‘I got it, I got it,’ but I had to start to run hard again and try to get safe at third.”
Hurdle said pregame that Osuna, Adam Frazier and John Jaso are all going to get opportunities in right field, but of the three of them, Osuna might end up hitting left-handers the best, so he could have something of a regular role in right until Starling Marte returns.
Osuna had a .952 OPS against left-handers with Indianapolis last season and a .917 mark with Altoona, so he certainly has the pedigree. Frazier actually has a reverse platoon split in his major league numbers right now, with a career .811 OPS against lefties and a .770 OPS against right-handers, but Frazier only has 33 at-bats against southpaws in the majors and he had a normal platoon split at every level of the minors coming up, so that trend isn’t likely to continue. Jaso, of course, has plenty of data to his career numbers and his .508 OPS against lefties suggests he isn’t an option.
NOTES
Josh Bell and Jordy Mercer each hit home runs. Bell’s was a two-run shot that went 410 feet into the notch in left center. It was his first major-league extra-base hit as a right-handed hitter. … David Freese had two RBIs and was 2 for 2 with runners in scoring position. … Juan Nicasio pitched 1.1 perfect with two strikeouts to bail out Glasnow and set the table for the back end of the bullpen. … Felipe Rivero, Daniel Hudson and Tony Watson all pitched scoreless innings.
