Pirates' Johan Oviedo can still salvage what has been a rocky 2023 campaign

To a degree, Pittsburgh Pirates starter Johan Oviedo has been the primary architect of his own shortcomings this season.

His 11 losses are tied for second in all of baseball, and his accuracy continues to be hit or miss: Oviedo’s 49 walks lead the Pirates and are the ninth most in MLB.

Through his 21 starts in 2023, Oviedo (4-11, 4.60 ERA) has walked 3.76 batters per game, which is the sixth-highest rate in the league.

And yet, for all his struggles, Oviedo has delivered 10 quality starts for the Pirates, second to only Mitch Keller’s 12.

The 25-year-old’s 117⅓ innings pitched are also second most on the Pirates, again trailing Keller, and the same could be said of the 106 strikeouts Oviedo has recorded.

“We need to minimize the walks, No. 1,” manager Derek Shelton said last month. “Over the course of those starts, he’s actually pitched pretty well at times. We haven’t given him a ton of support.”

During no period was Shelton’s point behind Oviedo more relevant than in June, when Oviedo produced four quality starts and a 3.23 ERA.

His record in June? Winless with four losses, plus a no-decision June 5 vs. Oakland despite pitching seven innings and allowing only two runs.

Over his last four starts of the month, the Pirates were shut out twice and scored a total of three runs.

On Wednesday afternoon, Oviedo picked up an elusive win, turning in a quality start of six innings and one earned run allowed in the Pirates’ 3-2 victory over San Diego.

But before that, he had last earned a win May 19.

To be sure, throughout those two-plus months he went in between wins, Oviedo wasn’t always sunk by a lack of run support. Plenty of his starts got off the rails for self-inflicted reasons.

But Wednesday, Oviedo offered a concise assessment of what worked well for him against the Padres.

“What I’m trying to do is get ahead (in counts),” he said on the AT&T SportsNet postgame show. “Get quick and soft contact so I can move forward and go through a better game.”

The first few innings of Wednesday’s game had many of the earmarks of an Oviedo start that looked doomed to implode and end prematurely.

In the first inning, before he recorded a single out, Oviedo was charged by home plate umpire Paul Clemons for three pitch clock violations. He also allowed a leadoff single to Ha-Seong Kim, who advanced to second on a wild pitch, with Fernando Tatis Jr. then drawing a walk.

And yet, unlike many other instances this season, Oviedo settled down and got out of the jam unscathed.

“He was able to slow things down himself with the violations there early on, but he did an awesome job slowing things down, really finding a way to get back in the zone and get in the groove,” Wednesday’s acting manager, Don Kelly, told reporters Wednesday in San Diego.

Kelly, who served as skipper while Shelton served a one-game suspension, has Oviedo to thank, in part, for getting his managerial career off to a 1-0 start.

“Awesome to see him get a win. … He did a great job getting us through six (innings),” Kelly said.

For Oviedo, whose repertoire consists of a four-seam fastball, slider and curveball with the occasional changeup and sinker, dialing in on the basics might be the key to finishing the 2023 campaign on a positive note.

If Oviedo can manage that and regularly get a boost from the Pirates’ bats, August and September might be kind to him.

“If we’re looking at the actual execution part, it would just be making sure that we minimize the walks and put himself in a position where he’s not pitching from behind because of now throwing the ball over the plate,” Shelton said.