Rare miscue from Sánchez sinks Phils as bats stumble

PITTSBURGH -- Cristopher Sánchez gave the Phillies yet another quality start on Saturday night at PNC Park, continuing to add to his best MLB season to date. However, a rare occurrence against him plus an offering that gave the Phils’ hitters fits led to a 4-1 loss.

Sánchez pitched scoreless ball over five innings, but it wasn’t without a bit of early traffic. He allowed one of the first two hitters he faced in each inning to reach base safely through his first four innings.

The damage through the first two innings was just a pair of singles. However, center fielder Johan Rojas likely saved a first-inning run with a stellar catch on a low, sinking liner from Nick Gonzales, who was the walk-off hero for Pittsburgh in the series opener. The ball had a 35 percent catch probability, ranking it a four-star catch by Statcast’s metric.

“That catch in the first inning was incredible,” Phillies manager Rob Thomson said.

In the third, Yasmani Grandal hit a one-out double to put himself in scoring position with the top of the Pirates’ order coming to bat. Sánchez induced a groundout from Andrew McCutchen then a flyout from Bryan Reynolds to end the threat.

Sánchez’s greatest test in the first half of the game came in the fourth, when Connor Joe led off with a double. Sánchez bore down to get a flyout from Gonzales, then he struck out Oneil Cruz for the second time in a row. After a grounder to second with Joe on third was fired to first for the final out, Sánchez gave an emphatic clap of his glove as he headed back to the dugout.

These escape jobs have been fairly common for Sánchez, who owns a 2.97 ERA through 19 starts. What hasn’t been common on his line are home runs.

However, in the sixth inning, another early hit dropped, and this time it was a game-changer. McCutchen took three pitches well below the zone, then hit a 3-1 center-cut sinker into the bullpens in left-center field for a solo homer. It was only the third home run Sánchez has allowed this season over 109 innings; his 0.17 home runs per nine innings rate entering the game was the best among qualified MLB starters.

Leading up to that at-bat, catcher J.T. Realmuto, who returned to the team on Saturday, noticed that Sánchez’s slider wasn’t performing well. That turned the three-pitch pitcher into a two-pitch pitcher with just his sinker and changeup to depend on. He only threw the slider 10 times on Saturday, and just once in the sixth inning -- a ball to Cruz before he drove in the game-winning run with a double.

“The pitch was there in the bullpen. I felt good with it,” Sánchez said through an interpreter. “But then once I got going, it wasn’t so much. It’s just something that happens: one day you have the pitch, one day you don’t. It just happens.”

“I thought he was really good,” Thomson said of Sánchez. “He got in some trouble early and battled out of it. That was a good sign. He just got behind Cutch and threw a fastball up over the plate, and then Cruz runs into a fastball that was up. But overall, he pitched great.”

On the other end of the equation, one pitch gave the Phillies’ bats trouble. Pirates starter Luis Ortiz held the opposing offense scoreless over seven innings in one of his best starts to date, and his newly-developed cutter, which he only began to throw in MLB this season, had the Phils making weaker contact.

Realmuto said it looked deceptive, indicating more break than it actually provided, and Thomson said it complemented his other pitches to create tough at-bats.

“I think the cutter that he’s developed is kind of a difference-maker for him,” Thomson said of Ortiz. “It keeps lefties honest, keeps them off the barrel, but his fastball was good, and he’s throwing strikes. And the slider was good. He threw the ball well.”

Bryce Harper crushed a homer that bounced out of the ballpark in the ninth-inning, but a late two-run homer by Cruz provided more insurance than the Phillies could afford. The team dropped its second series in a row, the first time in more than a month it has lost back-to-back sets.