What's holding Bucs back amid 8-game skid?

The Pirates are stuck in a team-wide funk, and it hasn’t shown many signs of lifting just yet.

Pittsburgh was defeated, 3-2, in a series opener with Washington at Nationals Park on Monday, marking the eighth consecutive loss for the Pirates -- their longest winless stretch of the season.

"Any time you're on a [long] skid, it's not easy,” Pirates shortstop Kevin Newman said. “But that's part of it. We're not the first team to have done that. It's part of the game.”

Perhaps the most frustrating part of this streak is that the Pirates have not been far out of games. They simply haven’t capitalized on their opportunities. Pittsburgh has not been handed a loss of more than three runs in the span.

So what’s going wrong in games that are so tightly contested? Here’s a few areas of concern -- or at least consideration -- from the past eight games.

The big hit
The Pirates’ offense was a little dormant vs. a hot Dodgers team in three of the eight games, but around that, they’ve had plenty of opportunities.

Pittsburgh’s offense is not built to hit home runs with regularity. Newman’s solo shot in the second inning on Monday was only his third over the past two seasons. Therefore, they’ve got to grind out at-bats and score runs by moving the line in more cases than not.

And that hasn’t happened lately. The Pirates’ offense is 9-for-60 (.150) over this eight-game losing streak, and it has also stranded 27 runners on base in the past three games alone. The most painful example came Saturday, when three consecutive batters struck out with the bases loaded in the top of the fifth inning.

“We had the bases loaded and nobody out, and we couldn’t make contact,” manager Derek Shelton said. “We’ve got to make adjustments there. We had some situations there to score runs.”

Reliable relievers
Some of their steady middle relievers are slowly beginning to falter, which is not a good sign for the Pirates, who have relied upon them to win tight games earlier this season.

On Monday, the crushing blow came on a solo homer by Kyle Schwarber in the seventh inning off Clay Holmes, who has been charged with seven runs in his past three outings. Before this recent stretch of woes, Holmes carried a 0.39 ERA through a stretch of 21 games, becoming one of the most effective Pirates relievers in the process.

It’s also frustrating because Holmes was locating his sinker and slider with great ease to the low-and-away corner to right-handed hitters. It just came down to one bad curveball.

“With the exception of that pitch, I thought Clay’s stuff was sharp,” Shelton said. “That pitch was a 1-0 curveball that he was trying to throw in the corner. He left it up middle, and Schwarber took a good swing at it.”

Short starts -- some by design
The Pirates have gotten starts of five or fewer innings in six of the eight games during the losing streak. A few of the shorter outings have been due to ineffectiveness, like Mitch Keller’s 2 2/3 innings against the Dodgers on Thursday. But some have been because of quick moves to the bullpen.

On Sunday, Wil Crowe batted for himself in the top of the sixth inning with the bases loaded and two outs, and he grounded out to end the threat. Then, he faced one batter -- Tim Lopes -- and issued a 10-pitch walk to bring his pitch count up to 82 pitches.

Crowe was pulled, and David Bednar gave up three runs in another uncharacteristic bullpen outing.

“We were planning on running him through,” Shelton said of Crowe on Sunday. “He was at 72. It was the fact that that at-bat got extended that long.”

Outside of one long third inning, JT Brubaker was also efficient and effective against the Nationals on Monday. Yet he was taken out at 71 pitches -- the fewest he’d thrown this season -- for Chris Stratton, and then Holmes served up the go-ahead home run the inning after.

However, Brubaker believed the move made sense based on some earlier at-bats.

“I walked [Josh Bell] earlier, so it’s the last thing [I want], is to go out there and get a runner on and [have] him see the ball well,” Brubaker said. “I felt confident in attacking him, but based on the previous ABs, it’s just situational.”