Baseball is undoubtedly a team sport. In fact, I would argue it is the most intensely team-based sport among the major North American sports. Unlike leagues like the NFL or NBA, collecting a few stars on a baseball team can only make a marginal difference. If you have any doubt, baseball history is replete with examples of teams that include multiple Hall of Famers and fail to even make a World Series let alone win one. But tonight, Paul Skenes looked as if he didn’t even need a team behind him.
He started the night with 4.2 of no-hit innings that were only broken on a swinging bunt from Lourdes Gurriel Jr and a screaming single to left from Nolan Arenado. Outside of that one threat, the D-Backs failed to muster even a nominal challenge to Skenes’ dominance, swinging early and freely. For Michael Soroka, it was an incredibly tough luck loss. His only fatal mistake came on the fourth pitch of the game when Brandon Lowe took a hanging changeup on the outside edge of the plate right to the centerfield camera well for the only run of the game.
After Lowe’s homer, the Pirates followed up with a Bryan Reynolds single and a Ryan O’Hearn walk and I started to get a sinking deja vu feeling of that nightmarish first inning in Milwaukee last Thursday. Instead, the D-Backs performed the first of many defensive gems all over Chase Field that kept the game as close as it was. In the first, Arenado took away a hit from Nick Gonzales on a hot shot down the line and nearly turned it into a double play. There was the diving catch at the warning track by Alek Thomas to take away a double from Spencer Horwitz, and there were multiple plays at the plate – including an inexplicably bad baserunning blunder that ended the second inning.
Maybe it’s a little unfair to call a 2.91 ERA and 0.824 WHIP season as up and down, but that’s exactly what happens when you set the bar as high as Skenes has with a Rookie of the Year award and then follow it up with a unanimous Cy Young award. It’s also probably a little unfair to be upset about losing to a pitcher like that when nearly every pitch offering seems to be working. Thankfully, the D-Backs will have a chance to take the series tomorrow against Mitch Keller while Zac Gallen will look for another bounceback performance after yet another blowup against the Cubs on Friday.
