CINCINNATI -- A subtle repertoire change helped unlock Quinn Priester’s best start of his young career.

With a heavier reliance on an improved sinker, the Pirates' rookie right-hander carried a no-hitter through five innings and earned his first quality start.

Priester left the game with a tie score intact, but the offense fell silent in the final four frames of a 4-2 loss to Cincinnati on Sunday at Great American Ball Park. The team’s 82nd loss officially eliminated the Pirates from postseason contention and ensured a fifth straight losing season.

Losses are never fun, but six innings of two-run ball are a great sign for the team’s fifth-ranked prospect (No. 93 overall, per MLB Pipeline), who came into the day with a 8.61 ERA in eight games.

“He did a good job with his sinker,” Pirates manager Derek Shelton said. “He really used it effectively, used it to mix back and forth, maintained his velocity. He gave up the base hit. The two guys at the top gave him some issues. Then he made one bad pitch. But overall, I thought he threw the ball really well.”

Priester has always been a ground-ball pitcher, but he’s been shifting even more to his sinker lately. Heading into the game, Priester was throwing his sinker 32.0 percent of the time and his four-seamer (which often has cutter-like spin) 20.3 percent of the time. But on Sunday, he threw the sinker at a 42.4 percent rate while only throwing 11 four-seamers in 92 pitches.

And it’s not just that he’s throwing the sinker more -- he’s throwing it more effectively as well. He has worked on improving his athleticism to add a tick of velocity (94.4 mph average on Sunday, up from 93.3 on the season). The pitch did not get any swings and misses, but he got eight called strikes on it and all five sinkers put into play resulted in outs.

“Just with the velo being up with it and feeling a lot better, we know we can attack with that pitch and have a lot more margin of error than we did before,” Priester said. “Guys have a really tough time getting that pitch in the air, and in a ballpark like this, keeping the ball on the ground is huge. Just using the heck out of that pitch when it's feeling good and coming out good. It's definitely been more of a weapon.”

Priester ran into trouble earlier in the season by walking too many hitters (4.89 BB/9) and giving up too many homers (2.33 HR/9). And although he allowed five walks and a home run on Sunday, he was able to minimize the damage with ample ground balls.

After walking Jonathan India and TJ Friedl, the first two batters of the game, Priester was able to navigate the trouble with a double play on -- you guessed it -- a sinker before ending the inning on a foul popout. When he walked India and Friedl again in the third, he pumped two sinkers into the zone for a strike and punched Spencer Steer out on a changeup.

Priester’s lone mistake was a backdoor slider that caught a little too much of the plate, and Friedl sent it over the right-field wall for his third homer in as many days.

“I thought he threw the ball well,” said Jason Delay, who caught his first regular-season game with Priester. “The plan of attack going in, knowing that this is a pretty patient team, was you’ve got to throw strike one, throw strike two and go from there. Obviously, that first inning [we] didn’t execute that plan very well. But after that, he settled in. He really had that sinker going, getting a lot of early contact, a lot of weak contact, a lot of ground balls. Overall, very happy with what I saw.”