8-3-2025 – By Michael Castrignano – @412DoublePlay on X
After previously losing just three times this season when scoring 5+ runs in a game, the Pirates have nearly doubled that total this weekend following two games in which they blew late leads in each.
The offense has piled on 21 runs against one of the worst teams in baseball but, thus far, has zero wins to show for it. They’ll try to keep the offense rolling today though as they face another scuffling starter in Colorado’s Bradley Blalock.
A 32nd round pick by the Boston Red Sox in 2019, Blalock even making it the MLB is surprising given both his draft position and numbers he posted along the way – a 4.59 ERA and 1.41 WHIP across 294 minor league innings – but his major league line has, unsurprisingly, not been great.
His 4.36 K/9 mark is the lowest among any pitcher with at least 30 innings pitched on the year while only rotation-mate, Antonio Senzatela, has a higher batting average against than Blalock’s .341 mark.
Over eight starts with the Rockies this year, Blalock has thrown 33 innings, allowed 26 runs off 47 hits, 7 walks, 2 hit batters and just 16 strikeouts.
But much of that damage came in a single blowout appearance on May 10th (12 runs through 3.2 innings) leading to his demotion afterwards but he’s been much better since his return to Colorado.
Blalock features a mid-90s 4-seamer as his main offering while using a mid-80s slider and high-80s cutter against righties and pivoting to high-80s splitter and low-80s curve as his main secondaries versus lefties.
Some may point to Blalock’s recent success as a sign that he is turning a corner; however, two of three games have been away from Coors and the lone home start saw him allow 2 runs off 8 hits and a walk with no strikeouts over 5.2 innings with just 44 of 73 pitches going for strikes with opposing batters making contact on 30 of 34 swings and average exit velocity of nearly 97 MPH on batted balls in play.
His splitter has been his best pitch with 8.9 inches of horizontal movement arm-side resulting in an xwOBA of .179 – but in that home start, he only threw 4 splitters and wasn’t able place any of them for strikes.
The pitch is effectively neutralized due to the high altitude at home, forcing him to rely on his fastball and curve when facing lefties, against which they are batting .378 and .500 while slugging .649 and .688, respectively.
Righties should also be looking for the 4-seam fastball up in the zone (.364 batting average and .591 slugging) and the slider low and away (.333 BA and .500 SLG).
Look for Blalock to attack the zone with the fastballs and be ready to attack them. The offense has been aggressive the first two games but need to keep the foot on the gas if they want to salvage this series out west before returning home this week.
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