Brandon Pfaadt's unusual day costs Diamondbacks in loss to Orioles
BALTIMORE — Brandon Pfaadt found himself in the type of comfortable situation in which he has so often excelled this season. Two outs, two strikes, bases empty. A moment for Pfaadt to spin a slider under a waving bat, or dial up a fastball at the top of the zone. Maybe send a tailing changeup beyond the whiff of an off-balance hitter.
Here, he could do none of those things. Pfaadt didn’t pitch poorly on Friday night, holding a potent Orioles lineup to three runs in six innings. But he was not at his commanding best. Through 25 major league starts, he had never struck out fewer than three batters. In a 4-2 loss to the Orioles, he struck out none.
And in a fifth inning that began so smoothly, that doomed Pfaadt and the Diamondbacks.
From a 1-2 count, he left three breaking balls off the plate to Gunnar Henderson, two of them missing wide right and never having a chance to goad a swing out of Baltimore’s star shortstop. The next batter was a similar story. Pfaadt put Adley Rutschman in an 0-2 hole but couldn’t finish the job. He yanked a changeup in the dirt then allowed a single on a fastball that he later called a good pitch. That was immaterial to Ryan O’Hearn, who made Pfaadt pay for the previous two baserunners by singling home the Orioles’ decisive third run.
That inning, Pfaadt said, was emblematic of an issue with which he struggled all night.
“The downfall was we got too horizontal,” Pfaadt said, referencing the movement on his pitches. “I think we were working that way more than up and down. I think that kept them on each pitch more often.”
Both Pfaadt and manager Torey Lovullo still left encouraged by the outing. Afterward, Pfaadt said he “felt strong” while Lovullo called it a “real good day.”
And in a sense, it was. Pfaadt got ahead of Orioles hitters, keeping them off balance and forcing weak contact. Their only extra base hit against him came on a line drive into center field that was not particularly well struck. Plus, the Orioles lead the American League in runs per game. Against that group, it’s hard to nitpick a quality start.
“They're a tough out, especially with two strikes,” Lovullo said. “So credit to them. But Brandon's versatile. He can make pitches and keep us in games.”
But Pfaadt’s fifth inning revealed the flaws in pitching to contact. On another night, he could have ended the inning with a strikeout, enabling the Diamondbacks offense to tie the game when it scraped a run across in the next inning. On this night, Baltimore got the final push it needed.
“We've gotta be able to put those guys away in that situation,” Pfaadt said. “Those are their best hitters. And I think putting them away more often will help limit that damage and I think that's something that I meant (with) working more vertical to get those guys out.”
It was an atypical outing for Pfaadt given the context of his season. Through seven starts, he had collected 42 strikeouts and issued just six walks — numbers that suggest his ERA should be far better than 4.60.
On Friday, his lack of strikeouts, along with two walks, suggested a difficult night. And yet, he worked through it to leave the game encouraged by his performance. In that context, it was an encouraging start — a sign that Pfaadt is developing the fortitude to perform better than his stuff on a given day. It was not, though, quite enough.
After scoring 26 runs during their four-game win streak, the Diamondbacks offense returned to the doldrums in which it has spent large swaths of this season. Ketel Marte homered in the second and Eugenio Suarez notched an RBI single in the sixth, but the Diamondbacks could not pick up the late hits that a comeback would have required.
“We didn't win the game,” Lovullo said, “but this is one of those things where I feel like we're just continuing to push in the right direction even though we didn't come out on the right side of the score.”
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Brandon Pfaadt's unusual day costs Diamondbacks in loss to Orioles
