Tim Benz: Pirates already show anything less than elite from starters will get them burned

The Pittsburgh Pirates have enough flaws that they don’t need much help to be highlighted.

Less-than-stellar starting pitching will do exactly that, though.

As the Pirates limped through a 1-3 start in Miami, the starting pitching offset the rest of the team’s shortcomings to at least make the Buccos competitive through nine innings — and sometimes beyond — in every game of that first series against the Marlins.

That was true to the extent that the Bucs were walked-off in all three defeats.

In those four games, all four of the Pirates starters — Paul Skenes, Mitch Keller, Bailey Falter and Andrew Heaney — went at least five or six innings, and none of them allowed more than two earned runs. Unfortunately, Keller was the only one to walk away with a win.

The Pirates lost the other three contests amid a cavalcade of fielding miscues, empty at-bats, baserunning misadventures and bullpen implosions.

Monday night, the Pirates got through their series opener against the Tampa Bay Rays without too many of those issues cropping up. But the bats remained quiet, and this time, the starter couldn’t stake the club to a lead as Carmen Mlodzinski and company lost 6-1.

Mlodzinski, thrust into the starting rotation when Jared Jones was shut down in spring training, couldn’t make it out of the fourth inning, allowing four earned runs on seven hits.

The first three innings for Mlodzinski were good, yielding just one run and one walk. The second full-time through the order, though, didn’t go so well.

“I probably need to just execute a little bit in a different zone,” Mlodzinski said on SportsNet Pittsburgh after the game. “They were kind of leaning out over (the plate) a little bit. (It) wasn’t necessarily like I threw pitches right down the middle that were getting hit.”

The Rays opened the bottom of the fourth with four straight hits to make it 2-0. Then Jake Mangum provided the big hit — a two-run single on a 0-1 count to make it 4-0.

Jake 2 ???? pic.twitter.com/s2Kniy8gLA

— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) April 1, 2025

One batter later, Mlodzinski was pulled.

“He left a couple of balls up in the fourth. They weren’t hit overly hard, but they were up in the zone. That kind of led to it,” manager Derek Shelton told reporters after the game. “Early on, he was really effective. He kept the ball down. He got some ground balls, got (a) ground ball double play. But it just looked like in the fourth, the ball got elevated a little.”

To Shelton’s point, by MLB standards, a “hard hit” ball is 95 miles per hour or more off the bat. Only one of Tampa’s hits that inning registered that high. But five hits in an inning is just too many, regardless of what exit velocity may tell you.

Especially when it’s the Pirates who are attempting to hit on the other side of the ledger.

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On Monday, the Pirates managed just four hits against four Tampa pitchers. One of them was a bunt. They went down on strikes 10 times and didn’t manage to work a single walk. Fifteen Pirates were sent down in a row at one point in the game.

“We were a little bit defensive, and I think we have to be a little more aggressive,” Shelton said. “The Rays pitching is hard, and it is at you. I don’t think they threw a pitch under 95 (mph). It looked like we were a little bit on our heels.”

Through five games, the Pirates are hitting just .174 as a team (27th out of 30 MLB teams). The club has racked up 46 strikeouts already, fourth-most in the league.

The Pirates avoided trainwreck errors and the cataclysmic baserunning blunders. Even the bullpen was good, giving up just one run over the final 4⅓ innings.

But for the 2025 Pirates, the starting pitching can’t just be consistent. It has to be constant.

The rest of this team leaves the rotation with so little margin for error, even when the fifth starter is out there. If that one unit isn’t in top form on the mound to start the game, it’s going to be a long six months.

Then again, with this franchise, isn’t that usually the case?