Latos, #WeirdBaseball, Series Form

Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

Bad baseball is bad. The dodgers-pirates series didn’t get any less weird, but unfortunately weird doesn’t necessarily mean better as the team dropped the second game in this 3 game series after playing bad baseball.

The offense showed up, part timers that probably shouldn’t be, hit well against Liriano as Scott Van Slyke collected 2 RBIZ against him and Kiké Hernandez hit a monster 2 run shot to tie the game in the 3rd inning. The offense  surprisingly hasn’t been a  problem at all on this road trip, and while Joc Pederson and Yasiel Puig are fighting through some insane struggles, everybody else has showed up.

The problem at this point is the pitching, Mat Latos, and his god awful swinging strike percentage just aren’t fooling anybody thus far, he got Andrew McCutchen to whiff (though he later drove in a run) in the first inning, and I couldn’t remember another swing and a miss pitch he threw all game. That’s something that must change if he wishes to stay in line for a playoff roster spot.

While Liriano was bad at pitching, he outperformed his counter part while batting, and Liriano crushed a Latos meatball in the 2nd inning with 2 men on, despite the best efforts of an overreaching Scott Van Slyke, the ball still made it out.

The next inning wasn’t any better as the Pirates score twice, capped off by an emphatic solo dinger by Pittsburgh’s own, Neil Walker.

The rest of the game was mostly  uneventful after that which says something about the nature of the series at this point, a 9th inning rally by the dodgers putting the go ahead runner on base almost pales in comparison to the several game changing reviews/ pitchers hitting leverage home runs/ hitter interferences that result in nothing negative happening to one team. This series is absurd and at this point the team should be looking to get the heck out of Pittsburgh with a 2 game division lead.