From the decision to pull Joe Ross to Jake Bauers' costly error, examining the Brewers' fateful inning

PITTSBURGH – Pat Murphy got to experience every manager’s least favorite rite of passage from the dugout and adjacent visiting manager’s office at PNC Park:

Murphy made a move to remove starter Joe Ross from the ballgame in the sixth inning Monday night. It didn’t work, the go-ahead and eventual winning runs scored and Murphy was asked about the backfiring decision after the Milwaukee Brewers’ 4-2 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The reality was that the decision to take Ross out of the game was not the direct reason the Brewers lost. Had Jake Bauers not made a critical throwing error in the inning, perhaps the Pirates don’t score. And speaking of scoring, the Brewers themselves didn’t do much of it against rookie Jared Jones and the Pittsburgh bullpen.

But for the first time in his first 21 games at the helm of the Brewers, a debatable bullpen decision for Murphy played a role in a loss.

Box score: Pirates 4, Brewers 2

Brewers starter Joe Ross felt 'good' in the sixth inning

After Ross got Bryan Reynolds to roll over to first to lead off the bottom of the sixth, the Brewers right-hander had faced the minimum over his last eight outs with an average exit velocity of 73.1 mph on the last five batted balls.

Third baseman Joey Ortiz was unable to make a play on a grounder deep behind the base at third, giving Ke’Bryan Hayes an infield hit to put a man on first with one out. Most figured Ross, who had allowed just one run through 5 ⅓ innings and had thrown just 79 pitches, would stay in the game. Ross did, too.

“I felt good,” Ross said. “Maybe my velo was down a bit, but I felt good. I wasn’t really expecting to come out of the game at that point, but it is what it is. They made a decision and put in someone else.”

Murphy indicated that Ross’ pitches were starting to flatten out later in the outing, and around 80 pitches is the point at which the Brewers watch closely for that with Ross.

“Again, when he reaches a certain mark, we know the guy, we know what his workload is,” Murphy said. “It was pretty standard in that it was the guys that were in there coming to hit, with his stuff starting to flatten out a little bit, you take him out for those lefties.”

Perhaps the Brewers saw something from the dugout that was concerning about how Ross was progressing. The velocity was down around 92-93 mph on his sinker late in the fifth inning, after all.

But Ross’ horizontal and vertical movement numbers, according to Statcast, remained fairly consistent across all his pitches, and the velocity on his one sinker thrown in the sixth was also back up to 94.4 mph.

Factoring into the decision, as well, was the fact that Pittsburgh had a pair of left-handed hitters coming up. The Brewers felt that, paired with what they saw in Ross’ stuff, they had reached the optimal spot for lefty Hoby Milner to come in.

By doing so, though, that gave the Pirates a reason to pinch-hit Connor Joe, who had a .820 OPS against lefties last year and a career mark of .785, for Rowdy Tellez, who was 0 for 2 on the night and had a .548 OPS coming in.

Joe singled off Milner, putting runners on first and second with one out.

Jake Bauers' error ultimately cost the Brewers

Still, the Brewers probably should have gotten out of the inning unscathed and nobody would be talking about whether Ross stayed in or not.

After Joe singled, Milner got Jack Suwinski, the second lefty in the Pirates’ stack, to ground weakly to Bauers. The normally sure-handed first baseman attempted a backhand shovel to Milner covering first but threw it well wide of the target. The ball rolled to the dugout and the go-ahead run scored from second.

“I was thinking about throwing to second the whole way then realized how slow it was hit,” Bauers said. “Then just kinda got out of position and tried to backhand it, didn’t have a feel for it, lost where the base was.”

The Brewers still would have had to retire Michael A. Taylor, the next batter, to get out of the inning had Bauers made the play. Taylor attempted a safety squeeze but bunted it right in front of the plate, allowing catcher William Contreras to tag him out; had Bauers gotten the out on Suwinski’s grounder, Taylor likely isn’t bunting.

But Bauers’ error undoubtedly extended the inning for Oneil Cruz, who came up after Taylor and lined a two-run single to left to put the Pirates up, 4-1.

It was a tough pill to swallow – from the decision to the defense – for the Brewers. And with TBA listed as the probable starter for three consecutive games the rest of the series, the Brewers missed out on a chance to start things off in Pittsburgh with a win.

A starting staff that has already thrown the fewest innings in baseball likely has some more short starts coming.

As far as Monday’s start goes, though, the pitching questions in the immediate future as well as the bullpen’s heavy usage early in the year didn’t lead to the Brewers potentially considering getting more outs out of Ross.

“It’s always what’s best for the pitcher,” Murphy said. “Squeezing something more out of somebody this early isn’t what we like to do. That’s why most relievers get a day, not many get back-to-backs. When they are, they’re both short. We’ve got a little bit of a strategy of what we can do. And when you come up short even though you had the runners in scoring position and you had chances to go ahead and you face a pitcher like we faced tonight, it looks a little more like, ‘Well we could’ve done this, we could’ve done that.’”

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Jake Bauers' error proves costly for Brewers in loss to Pirates