PIRATES – CUBS REACTIONS

Not only are the Pirates’ hopes of catching the St. Louis Cardinals starting to fade but they no longer seem to be a lock to, at the very least, host the National League wild card game for a third consecutive year.

The Pirates wound up losing three of four to the Cubs in the pivotal series that concluded Thursday afternoon with a 9-6 victory by Chicago at PNC Park.

The Pirates had their lead over the Cubs for the first NL wild card sliced to just two games. Furthermore, Chicago beat the Pirates for the 10th time in 16 meetings this year to clinch the season series and assure itself of hosting the winner-take-all wild card at Wrigley Field in the event the teams finish the regular season tied.

If losing three of four to the Cubs on their home field wasn’t bad enough, rookie infielder Jung Ho Kang left the game in the top of the first inning with a torn medial collateral ligament and broken tibia, according to a team source.

Playing shortstop, Kang was slid into by Chris Coghlan in an unsuccessful attempt to break up a double play.

All of the bad news left the Pirates in a somber mood at the end of a gorgeous late-summer afternoon on the North Shore.

“Anytime you play a team 19 times in a season, you start to — not dislike the people, you start to, competitively, you don’t want anybody to get hits on the other side, you don’t want anybody to do well against you,” Pirates second baseman Neil Walker said. “The last thing you want is for somebody from your side to get hurt.

“We got beat in several aspects of the game all week. They outplayed us, then the icing on the cake [hide] is they knocked out one of our best players.”

Kang’s transition of being the first native South Korean hitter to go from the Korean Baseball Organization to the major leagues has been quite successful. He is hitting .287 with 15 home runs and 58 RBIs in 127 games while making 54 starts at third base and 48 at shortstop.

The Pirates do have options if Kang is out for a significant amount of time as they can play veteran Aramis Ramirez or super utility man Josh Harrison at third base on a regular basis.

“Our bench is definitely built for something like this,” shortstop Jordy Mercer said. “Obviously we don’t want anything like this to happen, but in case something did happen, we’ve got guys that can fill in right away. That’s the luxury of having a deep bench like we have.”

Pirates manager Clint Hurdle did not want to speculate on Kang’s injury or what how he might have to potentially shuffle the lineup card. However, he summed up the Pirates’ afternoon quite well.

“It was a rough day all over the place for all of us,” Hurdle said.

MORE BUZZ

— The Pirates headed out on a three-city, 10-game road trip after the game.

The Pirates play three against the NL West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers beginning Friday night then four against the Colorado Rockies before finishing with three games against the Cubs at Wrigley Field
next weekend.

Hurdle preferred to look ahead to the trip rather than behind at the missed opportunity to potentially bury the Cubs.

“We played hard, we didn’t play well enough and we didn’t play good enough baseball and that’s the focus point,” he said. “We’ve got to play better baseball moving forward.”

–Right-hander Charlie Morton lost for the fourth time in five starts to fall to 9-8 as he allowed six runs — five earned — on nine hits in four innings with five strikeouts and two walks.

Morton was knocked out during a six-run fifth inning in which the Cubs turned a 4-3 deficit into a 9-4 lead with Anthony Rizzo starting the outburst with a two-run home run.

“I made four really bad pitches with changeups,” Morton said. “Three of them were down, below the zone, but I pulled them in on lefties and that’s just a bad spot to be in, is down-in to a lefty. The pitch to Rizzo, that pitch is six, seven inches off the ground but it’s in and he dropped the barrel on it.”

–Center fielder Andrew McCutchen got the day off in advance of the Pirates beginning an 11-game road trip Friday night against the Dodgers at Los Angeles. McCutchen played both games of Tuesday’s doubleheader split against the Cubs and all 12 innings of Wednesday night’s loss to Chicago.

–Left-hander Francisco Liriano will start Saturday against the Dodgers then have his next turn in the rotation skipped. The Pirates want to give Liriano a break as he has made 28 starts and pitched 167 innings, the second-most of his 10-year career. Liriano logged 162 1/3 innings last season.[/hide]