The Pirates didn’t exactly author a pretty one Tuesday night. They just survived one.
In a 13-12 win over the Giants at PNC Park, Pittsburgh got the kind of chaotic, bruising result that can feel more like a coin flip than a clean ballgame. Brandon Lowe said that was fine by him.
“Just a long, weird one,” Lowe said. “Happy we walked out with a win.”
That’s the lens Lowe brings this time of year. He’s lived through collapse, and he’s watched teams catch fire at the right moment, too.
So when the Pirates improved to 68-71 and kept even a sliver of hope alive, he wasn’t interested in grading the aesthetics. He was interested in the win.
The Pirates are five games back of the final National League Wild Card spot, but Lowe pointed to the smaller picture - the day in front of them, the game in front of them, the homestand in front of them. Manager Don Kelly has been hammering that same message lately.
“I’ve seen weirder things happen,” Lowe said. “We were just talking about weird games.
We’ve seen some incredible streaks happen. I’ve seen teams implode.
I’ve been on teams that have imploded a little bit. Five games really isn’t that much.
People can say that it is. But it’s not even a week’s worth of games.
Anything can happen.
“That’s the biggest thing - we have to take care of things that we can take care of. We play our baseball, we’ll see where we are in a few weeks.”
Tuesday’s 3-hour, 38-minute opener had just about everything except polish. The Giants put up five runs in the second, then handed the Pirates a nine-run third.
Pittsburgh answered with that nine-run burst, then watched San Francisco tack on five in the eighth. The two teams went 14 for 35 with runners in scoring position and still left 23 men on base.
It was messy. It was loud. It was exactly the kind of game Pittsburgh needed to win anyway.
Lowe and Oneil Cruz drove the offense. Each finished with four hits, and Cruz added four RBIs while continuing to look locked in since coming off the injured list. In 12 games back, he’s hitting .311 with a .970 OPS, which ranks 19th in MLB.
Cruz also showed a patient approach early, taking what was there and spraying singles up the middle and the other way instead of trying to force the issue.
Lowe did his part in a bigger way. He hit his 29th home run of the season, launching an elevated fastball 411 feet to right-center, and he also made a terrific diving play on defense. It was another all-around day for a player Kelly has leaned on all season.
“He’s been such a stabilizing force for us all year with the homers and defense,” Kelly said of Lowe. “The defense has been much, much better than anticipated.
He showed that again [Tuesday]. Just the professional at-bats that he has every single day, he did it again [Tuesday].”
Lowe now has 130 hits, matching his 2025 total and leaving him two shy of his career high of 132 in 2021.
The support didn’t stop with those two. Every Pirates starter got at least one hit, and Nick Gonzales had three. Only Luis Arraez has a better batting average (.318) than Gonzales (.310) among NL hitters, and Gonzales still leads MLB with 53 multi-hit games.
Henry Davis helped crack things open with a line-drive single to right in the Pirates’ nine-run third, and Bryan Reynolds turned in several solid at-bats while scoring three runs.
The pitching side was a different story. Paul Skenes couldn’t keep his fastball in the right spots and gave up five earned runs over 4 2/3 innings. Rafael Devers hammered a three-run homer on a middle-middle heater that he clearly didn’t miss.
The bullpen couldn’t stop the slide from there. Evan Sisk walked three in the eighth and all three came around to score, and Luke Weaver wasn’t able to halt the damage. After being one of the best bullpens in baseball in August, this was a rough one.
Still, Kelly liked the way his club attacked at the plate, especially early, when the Pirates kept the game simple and let the inning build on itself.
“Hitting’s contagious, and when you start to get that flow and start to get the guys in rhythm, they feel that,” Kelly said. “I thought that that was the best inning that we’ve had in a long time.”
That inning lasted 34:44 and somehow didn’t include an extra-base hit. The Pirates still made it count, drawing bases-loaded walks and cashing in on Giants mistakes while staying patient enough to let the chaos work in their favor.
For Lowe, that was the point. Win the day.
Handle what’s in front of you. Let the rest sort itself out.
“You look at where we are and the possibilities of what’s ahead of us, we have to take care of business on our end,” Lowe said. “We’ll see what happens. We started out the homestand right, and it sets us up for a chance to win a series tomorrow.”
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Pirates Suddenly Have A Bullpen Problem At The Worst Time
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Wilber Dotel also got the call back up as part of the same round of roster shuffling, while Evan Sisk was optioned to Indianapolis. The timing is less than ideal for a Pirates team trying to keep its late-game options intact, and Yates injury leaves the staff waiting to see how deep the bullpen hole becomes before the next stretch of games really settles in. [Read more 🡒]