Pirates allow steal of home in loss to Rockies

DENVER — Many on social media are calling it the easiest steal of home in baseball history.

Pirates catcher Yasmani Grandal, the victim of the theft and the man left watching as a gift run crossed the plate in front of him, called it the result of a mental lapse before making a cryptic statement about the play in general.

“That can’t happen,” said the veteran backstop after the Rockies routed the Bucs, 16-4, at Coors Field on Saturday night. “Obviously, it’s a mental error, pretty much. There are a few other things that are going into that.

“Let’s just keep it a mental error.”

The mental error Grandal spoke of was his lob back to Pirates starter Jared Jones after a pitch in the fifth inning, when Colorado’s Ryan McMahon broke from third and stole home standing up, barely breaking a sweat.

Third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes was playing well off the bag and there was no way he could’ve gotten there in time to chase McMahon back.

As the ball left Grandal’s hand, McMahon was off and running. Jones saw the play unfolding out of the corner of his eye, but in one of those moments when you feel the despair of utter helplessness as time nearly comes to a standstill, he could do nothing but wait for the baseball to get to him as the inevitable became reality.

When the ball finally came down, Jones snatched it out of the air and turned his back to the scene of the crime.

McMahon said the keys to the play were his third base coach, Warren Schaeffer, and what he saw becoming a pattern from Grandal.

“Honestly, kind of the way he was throwing it back was what triggered Shaeff to say something,” McMahon said.

It was the entire evening for the Bucs compressed into one play — the club had a “flat” performance, as Hayes put it, and no moment encapsulated it better than when McMahon pulled off the baseball equivalent of taking candy from a baby.

Jones, when asked whether the outcome was unavoidable given the factors — a third baseman playing way off the bag with a left-handed hitter at the plate, the catcher making a soft throw back to the mound and a keen, though by no means fleet-of-foot, baserunner — Jones’ answer echoed his body language in the immediate aftermath of the play.

“I mean, sure,” said the electric 22-year-old rookie right-hander. “Whatever you want to put on it.”

What the Pirates weren’t able to put on the play was the label “All’s well that ends well.” That’s because while the deficit was a manageable four runs (at Coors Field) relatively early in the contest, things would only get worse.

Jones was lifted from the game after walking the batter who was at the plate when McMahon scored — Nolan Jones. At 4 2/3 innings, it was the second-shortest start of Jared’s young career. He was charged with six runs on six hits, walked four and struck out six.

“The slider wasn’t its best today,” Jones said. “Wasn’t really sharp. The fastball — everything was just down in general today.”

The altitude of the ballpark didn’t help.

“I’m a four-seam guy,” Jones said. “I try and get popups. That stuff just kind of happens.”

The stuff Jones was referring to was five Rockies extra-base hits against him, including a 440-foot home run by Hunter Goodman — one of two Goodman would hit on a career night — over the wall in right-center field in the third.

At the plate, the Bucs just couldn’t get going. Aside from solo home runs by Nick Gonzales and Andrew McCutchen — McCutchen’s fifth straight game at Coors Field with a home run, making him the third visiting player to accomplish that — a Grandal infield single and a Gonzales RBI groundout was all she wrote for Pittsburgh’s lineup.

For a month, the Pirates have been hovering between two and five games under .500. The Pirates haven’t seen the .500 mark since April 25. With how competitive postseason races are currently, they’re by no means out of contention at this early hour in the season.

But staying flat just isn’t an option.

“That’s a game we’ve got to flush,” said manager Derek Shelton. “We’ve just got to move on and get to tomorrow and win the series tomorrow.”

Tomorrow is always a new day. But Saturday night for the Pirates was perhaps best summed up by Jones.

“It was a really bad day,” he said. “ … Nothing was good today.”