PITTSBURGH — Henry Davis went to Bubba Chandler pregame Saturday and told him how he wanted the rookie to attack the Athletics’ lineup. The recipe: Fastballs in the top of the zone.
Chandler established that pitch early and often, striking out the side in the top of the first to set the pace for a dominant evening of pitching at PNC Park. He would end up striking out six over five scoreless frames and surrendered the only double in what would be a one-hit shutout for the Pirates, who won 2-0.
“Fastball’s really good,” Athletics catcher Shea Langeliers said. “Slider’s really good. He even mixed in a changeup to me. When a guy like that is on, it’s going to be really tough. He looked really good tonight.”
Chandler finished with 15 whiffs on the evening, and while 35 of his 68 pitches were four-seam fastballs, usually at the top of the zone, most of his whiffs came on breaking and offspeed pitches down:
Those whiffs at the bottom of the zone were set up on being able to establish the fastball up, so the success of the fastball opened up the whole arsenal.
“When guys start keying on heaters and when you execute in bottoms and offspeed, you have to start going down there and then, once you start going down there, you go back up to the heater,” Chandler said. “It’s just kind of a cat-and-mouse game as a pitcher. I think I did a good job of that. I think Hank did a good job of instilling that in my head early that, ‘This is what we’re going to do. This is our plan and if they adjust to it, we’ll adjust, but until then just throw at where I put the glove at.’”
Chandler hit 100 mph 10 times on Saturday, a feat that has only been done by six other starting pitchers this season (Hunter Greene, Jacob Misiorowski, Joe Boyle, Jordan Hicks, Chase Burns and Shohei Ohtani). Since the advent of pitch tracking in 2008, only four Pirates had ever thrown at least 10 pitches at least 100 mph in a game: Paul Skenes, Aroldis Chapman, Felipe Vazquez and Arquimedes Caminero.
Chandler now has three outings this year where he has averaged over 99 mph on his fastball (99.2 mph on both Aug. 27 and Sept. 13 and 99.3 mph Saturday). Coming into Saturday, his 98.8 mph average four-seamer velocity would rank eighth in the Majors if he had thrown enough pitches to qualify for Baseball Savant’s leaderboards, with Greene and Misiorowski being the only starters on the list. There’s a chance that this pitch could be recognized as one of the best fastballs in the game in the near future if he can hold that velocity.
Saturday marked the 18th shutout by Pirates pitchers this season, the most in baseball. It’s also the third-most for any Pirate team in the Live Ball Era (since 1920), trailing only the 1992 (20 shutouts) and 1968 (19) clubs.
Braxton Ashcraft took the ball after Chandler on Saturday and tossed three perfect innings, looking more like the pitcher he had been most the season after he admitted he wasn’t his top self his last two outings. Making a return to the bullpen and getting to see what Chandler was doing set a pace for one of his better outings of late, striking out six.
“It’s easy to come in and ride that energy when your starter is shoving,” Ashcraft said.
“I’ve been able to see Bubba and Ashcraft in Triple-A a lot,” Nick Yorke, who homered Saturday, said. “So to see them do it here together back-to-back, that was a lot of fun.”
It’s no secret that pitching is going to have to carry this team if the Pirates are to be competitive in 2026, and when they get performances like that from two of the rookies who are supposed to bolster that group, it does offer some level of optimism moving forward.
“If you take a step back, [I] don’t believe you have to squint to see a good pitching staff, a pitching staff that can shut down opposing lineups,” general manager Ben Cherington said before the game. “… I do believe we are closer than our recent stretch suggests, maybe closer than some people think. But talk’s cheap. Gotta go do it.”
