The wait for baseball season this year led to plenty of classic games on television. So as
\n\nSpencer Turnbull is feeling himself. pic.twitter.com/z4cNjR0OnS
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) August 9, 2020
“I was reminding myself of every point I could come up with today,” Turnbull said. “None of my mental cues were working. Physically, I was just not getting through my pitches at all. My slider wasn’t biting at all. Changeup was kind of floating. I threw one decent curveball and I hit \\[Colin\\] Moran in the foot with it. All the other ones were just spinning. My sinker was moving good, but it was more lateral movement, running away. I can’t tell you how many arm-side misses I had today with the sinker.”\n\nHe said this after tossing seven innings of one-run ball. The curveball that hit Moran led to the only Pirates’ run of the game. The sinkers that ran off the plate drove Pittsburgh’s left-handed hitters crazy, helping set up 11 ground-ball outs.\n\n“When you get a guy that has the action that he does away from you and you do that, then you’re going to get a lot of ground-ball outs,” Pirates manager Derek Shelton said. “That’s what he did. He kept us off-balance and kept us on the ground. We had a couple opportunities to score and just didn’t get the big hit.”
That’s what makes Turnbull so nasty. His pitches move a lot -- sometimes as intended, sometimes not. Even when he’s off, he can be difficult to hit. If he doesn’t know where a ball’s going, the hitter probably doesn’t, either.\n\n“I thought he was filthy,” manager Ron Gardenhire said. “I thought his ball was moving all over. When you’re sitting that close to home plate, I thought the ball looked like it was dropping elevation. His sinker was going down so hard. His breaking balls look really good coming out of his hand.\n\n“I thought he had great stuff today. I thought that glove was getting knocked backwards from Romine. I was impressed. They had some big hitters up there, and he was throwing it by a lot of \\[them\\].”\n\nIt was Romine’s job to try to put that arsenal to use.\n\n“I think today we used his two- and four-seamers as maybe three different pitches,” Romine said. “His four-seam cuts. His two-seam sinks. We were keeping them honest.”
It didn’t result in Turnbull’s usual strikeout numbers. He induced just six swings and misses out of 92 pitches and recorded four strikeouts. Yet despite unpredictable command, Turnbull pounded the zone for 19 called strikes, all but one of them off his four- and two-seamers.\n\nMoran advanced from first to third on back-to-back groundouts before Erik Gonzalez hit a hard ground ball that second baseman Jonathan Schoop couldn’t stop for an RBI single. The 104.7 mph exit velocity was the second-highest of the game. Turnbull shut the Pirates down from there, pumping himself up as he kept his team alive for