Priester's tough start vs. Mets 'comes down to execution'

NEW YORK -- Quinn Priester has barely had a cup of coffee in the Majors, making just his sixth career outing on Monday night at Citi Field after his first start came almost a month ago. The whirlwind experience of making your big league debut and then trying to figure out how to remain at the Major League level can be a difficult one -- especially for a 22-year-old starter.

It’s full of lessons and reminders that development and focus on the process at this stage of the Pirates’ season is important as well.

“Yeah, it’s constant conversation,” manager Derek Shelton said before the Pirates’ 7-2 loss to the Mets. “When you have young players, you have to continually drill in the message, and then you have to show them examples of things they’ve done or maybe things their teammates have done. Like, ‘This is the modeling for what we need to do.’”

Priester, Pittsburgh’s No. 6 prospect (No. 98 overall, per MLB Pipeline), had another tough outing in the series opener: He allowed six runs on seven hits over five innings, walking three and striking out three. Priester was unable to make it through any of his innings unscathed, as the Mets scored in each of his five frames.

“You’re always looking for those things to get better at,” Priester said. “You have starts like tonight where there’s a lot of things you can get better at.”

For his manager, there was a clear avenue for Priester to improve in his outing against the Mets.

“We left too many balls over the middle of the plate,” Shelton said. “And when you do that, especially in advantage counts, we get hurt because of it.”

The Pirates took a 1-0 lead in the first frame after Henry Davis (a native of nearby Bedford, N.Y.) roped an RBI single in front of nearly 200 people from his hometown. However, in the bottom of first, Pete Alonso pulled an RBI double down the left-field line to tie the game. Alonso’s double came on a 2-2 sinker that was located belt high over the middle of the zone.

The two homers that Priester allowed -- a Daniel Vogelbach shot to lead off the second and a two-run blast from Jonathan Araúz with two outs in the fourth -- came with two strikes. Both pitches -- a 94 mph sinker to Vogelbach and a 93.3 mph fastball to Araúz -- caught too much of the heart of the plate.

“It comes down to execution,” Shelton said. “So whether it's trying to do a little bit too much with a pitch or just realizing he cannot miss in the middle in the big leagues -- either way, it's execution-based."

In just his sixth start, Priester was able to perform a differential diagnosis about what possibly led to a lapse in quality in those advantage counts.

“I think it’s just keeping that trust in myself,” he said. “The stuff is really good, we just need to be able to put it in the location we want to and kind of free myself up in those counts. I feel like I get real stiff and rigid with two strikes to really try and execute, rather than just throw the crap out of it.

“Whereas, 0-0 until two strikes, I’m just like, ‘Hey, here’s my best stuff.’ Ultimately, that’s going to be the separator for me once I’m able to do that. And then, I think we’re going to have a lot better results.”

The third and fourth innings were the key moments in the defeat. After Ke’Bryan Hayes delivered an RBI double to tie the game in the third, the Pirates left the bases loaded when Alfonso Rivas struck out. Then in the fourth, Hayes laced a fly ball to the warning track in right with two runners on -- his third exit velocity of 95+ mph in the game -- that was hauled in by Jeff McNeil for the final out.

"I think going back to our pitching side, we were one pitch away from getting out of three innings,” Shelton said. “In two innings, we were one pitch away from blowing the game open. I mean, [Carlos] Carrasco threw [88] pitches in three innings, and a two-out ball in the gap, and all of a sudden, we're talking about a different game.”