When Pittsburgh Pirates manager Derek Shelton reviews the video of the his team’s 5-4 loss to the Miami Marlins on Saturday, a variety of mistakes will jump off the screen.
• Two of his runners were thrown out at home plate.
• Oneil Cruz failed to hit the cutoff man again, and, later in the decisive 12th inning, he let a long fly ball tick off his glove for an error that ended up facilitating the victory for the Marlins (2-1).
• Pirates bats generated only nine hits (eight singles) in 12 innings, wasting another good performance by a starting pitcher. The Pirates have lost two of their first three games of the season, all one-run decisions.
“Tough loss,” Shelton said on the SportsNet Pittsburgh postgame show. “My takeaway is we did some things well, we did some things that we still need to improve on. Ultimately, those things we need to improve on ended up being the difference in the game.”
What hurt most are the mistakes that arose from situations not unfamiliar to the team.
“It’s things we worked on all spring. We just need to clean it up,” Shelton said.
Starting pitcher Bailey Falter, who followed Paul Skenes and Mitch Keller in the rotation, did his part, allowing only two runs and seven hits — but no walks — in the first six innings. He struck out four.
“My dad always told me, ‘First-ball strikes, no walks. You have a chance to give your team a W,’ ” Falter said. “I live off that.”
Falter’s effort was a repeat of the first two games at loanDepot Park in Miami.
Skenes left Opening Day on Thursday with a 4-1 lead before the Pirates lost 5-4. Keller was the winning pitcher Friday night. Skenes, Keller and Falter have thrown 17 1/3 innings, allowing only five runs, 15 hits and three walks for an impressive WHIP of 1.04 and ERA of 2.60.
In the end, the bats didn’t offer enough support. Pirates batters struck out 10 times, three by leadoff hitter Ji Hwan Bae, making his first start of the season.
The Marlins scored the winning run in the 12th after Cruz couldn’t catch a long fly ball off the bat of Jonah Bride. The play was ruled an error after it deflected off Cruz’s glove. That loaded the bases, and Dane Myers won the game with a long, walk-off single to right field against reliever Tim Mayza, the sixth Pirates pitcher of the day. It was the only time the Marlins led during the 3-hour, 42-minute game.
The Pirates took a 4-3 lead in the 11th on groundouts by Endy Rodriguez and Adam Frazier that scored automatic runner Ke’Bryan Hayes. But the Marlins tied the score against relief pitcher Joey Wentz in the bottom of the inning. The tying run scored when Kyle Stowers hit a line drive off Wentz’s leg, scoring Myers, the automatic runner.
The Pirates lost a chance to score in the 12th when automatic runner Tommy Pham was thrown out at home plate after a no-out single by Bryan Reynolds.
“I think if you asked Rabs (third-base coach Mike Rabelo), inadvertent send,” Shelton said. “He would take that one back, just knowing where we were at in the order.” If Pham had stopped at third, Cruz would have batted with runners on the corners and nobody out.
Long before that bit of drama, Jack Suwinski’s first at-bat of the season — a two-out double clocked at 105.9 mph — handed the Pirates a 1-0 lead in the first inning. Reynolds scored, but Cruz was thrown out at the plate.
“Two outs, he has to get a better read on that,” Shelton said.
Yet there were some good moments for the Pirates beyond Falter’s performance.
In the ninth inning, the Marlins almost walked off with the victory to avoid extra innings. Stowers singled against Colin Holderman, stole second base and moved to third on a groundout. When Griffin Conine hit a chopper to second base, Frazier threw out Stowers in a close play at the plate that was upheld by replay.
The Pirates broke a 2-2 in the seventh inning, thanks to one of their six stolen bases that gives them a total of 14, tying an MLB record for the first three games of the season.
Frazier and Isiah Kiner-Falefa triggered the inning with singles. With runners on first and third, Shelton called for a steal, and Marlins catcher Nick Fortes’ throwing error allowed Frazier to score.
The Marlins quickly tied the score 3-3 in the bottom of the inning when relief pitcher Justin Lawrence surrendered a double to Xavier Edwards and a run-scoring single to Otto Lopez. Cruz repeated his error from Opening Day when he overthrew the cutoff man, allowing Lopez to reach second base. This time, the mistake didn’t hurt because Lawrence struck out Bride to end the inning.
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“Our outfield defense has to improve,” Shelton said. “We’ve seen that over the first three games.”
Still, the Pirates looked like they might seize back the lead in the eighth, but left fielder Conine, son of Marlins World Series hero Jeff Conine, jumped up and over the outfield fence to rob Suwinski of a home run.
“Jack smoked three balls (in the course of the game),” Shelton said. “That kind of summed up the game right there.”
Frazier said the small things matter in games such as this one.
“It’s always the little details. It’s a game of inches,” he said. “We won a few of those, and we lost a few. You have to win them all. It’s major-league baseball. In order to win, you have to do the little things right. We have to keep working on that. We have some work to do, and we’ll back at it (Sunday).”