NewsPineiro completely dominates Mets
Starter goes the distance in shutout, contributes two hits
By Matthew Leach / MLB.com
06/23/09 11:56 PM ET
NEW YORK -- Perhaps it's not fair to call Joel Pineiro a one-trick pony. After all, he did have two hits on Tuesday night. But on the mound it was all about one pitch for Pineiro in a 3-0 win over the Mets.The right-hander incessantly pounded the strike zone with his sinking fastball, inducing 22 ground-ball outs en route to his second shutout of the season and the fifth of his Major League career. He needed a mere 100 pitches to record 27 outs, and he held the Mets to two hits. Of those 100 pitches, 77 were fastballs -- and Pineiro estimated that all but three of those were of the sinking, two-seam variety.
So nearly three-quarters of Pineiro's total offerings in a complete game were the same pitch. In order to do that, and not get hit all over the field, that one pitch had to be dynamite. On Tuesday, it assuredly was.
"You know you're going to get a lot of ground balls," said second baseman Skip Schumaker, who was busy behind the Cards' starter. "Pineiro's sinker, when it's on, it's nasty. And he showed how effective that sinker can be tonight."
Manager Tony La Russa has taken issue with the characterization of Pineiro as a one-pitch pitcher, believing that it does Pineiro a disservice to pigeonhole him. La Russa points to Pineiro's other three options, and in fairness, they were all quality choices on Tuesday.
"He's a much-more-than-that pitcher, and it kind of puts him in a category," La Russa said. "He's got a real good sinker, but he's got an outstanding changeup. He had a good curveball today. And he throws an effective slider. Plus, he fields his position. You can't run on him. He gets a lot of movement with other [pitches]. His changeup they hit into the ground today. They hit his slider and his curveball into the ground. It wasn't just his sinker. He's doing more than just pounding sinkers."
Except that on Tuesday, most of what he was doing was pounding sinkers. Approximately 74 of them. And Pineiro believes that his newfound reliance on the pitch is the single biggest reason why he's pitching better than he has since 2003.
"I think it has a lot to do with it," Pineiro said. "That's the majority of it. ... It's a pitch you've got to stick with and hopefully keep it down in the zone, and they hit ground balls right at people."
Entering Tuesday's game, Pineiro had thrown fastballs for 67.6 percent of his pitches, according to FanGraphs.com. That's by far the highest percentage of his career. He's also throwing the fastball at a lower average velocity than ever, an indication that a large chunk of those pitches are of the high-movement, lower-speed, two-seam variety rather than straighter, harder four-seamers.
"You see what a guy with a dominant sinker can do," said Mets pitcher Mike Pelfrey, an aficionado of the pitch. "He had a game plan to be aggressive with it, and he stuck to it. Why wouldn't you, the way it was working? He was in the bottom of the strike zone all night."
On top of pitching a shutout, Pineiro even added two hits of his own. He picked up the Cardinals' first hit, a third-inning double, and came home to score the team's first run thanks to Daniel Murphy's error on Schumaker's fielder's-choice grounder. Pineiro added a fourth-inning single for his second career two-hit game.
But it was on the mound where he truly shone, carving up the Mets with surgical efficiency. He didn't allow a fly ball until Omir Santos flied out to center field in the fifth inning. Pineiro, who began the night tied for the National League lead in losses, ended a five-start losing streak. He allowed two hits and one walk, and hit one batter, but he erased two of those baserunners on double-play balls.
"It was frustrating at first," Pineiro said of the losing streak, "but you can't control what our offense does. They're trying out there just the same way I'm trying to get outs."
The right-hander got backing from Albert Pujols, who increased his Major League-leading RBI total to 70 with a two-run single in the seventh inning. The bases-loaded hit was Pujols' fifth in as many at-bats. In six plate appearances with the sacks full this year, he has three home runs, two singles and a walk.
"I take every at-bat out there the same way," Pujols said. "I'm aggressive, and I'm going to go out there and try to look for my pitch and do some damage, with the bases loaded or nobody on. That's it. This game is already too hard for you to think too much."
The Cardinals beat the Mets for the fourth time in five meetings this year and won for the first time at the new Citi Field in a game that was delayed by rain for 52 minutes in the top of the third inning.
St. Louis has stretched its lead in the NL Central to two games over second-place Milwaukee and 3 1/2 over Chicago.
Matthew Leach is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
