Left-hander Justin Steele shook his head as he turned back toward the mound.
He had just located a second-pitch fastball up and in, half a ball off the plate. And somehow the Pirates’ Nick Gonzales had put the barrel of his bat on it and sent it about five rows up in the left-field bleachers.
“That’s kind of the love-hate relationship with Wrigley,” Steele said after the Cubs’ 5-4 loss to the Pirates on Thursday. “Sometimes the wind’s just howling out, and you can get in one of them jet streams, and it can get out.”
That home run in the fourth inning summed up Steele’s outing. He was executing his plan, but the Pirates still found ways to score.
“It was probably better than the line,” manager Craig Counsell said after Steele allowed five runs and six hits in 5⅔ innings.
Only looking at the two home runs he allowed and the high run total, it would be tempting to compare this outing to his last start, also against the Pirates, when he surrendered three home runs for the first time since his debut season. But if you look deeper, the outings diverge.
Steele’s issue last week in Pittsburgh boiled down to execution in 0-2 counts. And two of the three homers he gave up were on sliders he overthrew that ended up hanging over the plate.
That wasn’t a problem for Steele at Wrigley Field. When the Pirates were getting hits, they were doing so by swinging early in the count.
There was no better example of him getting movement on his slider with two strikes than in the fifth inning with a ball and two strikes on Oneil Cruz. Steele bounced a slider on the outside corner and still got Cruz to whiff for an inning-ending strikeout.
“In general, we didn’t play good enough defense tonight,” Counsell said.
The first instance he pointed to was a double-play opportunity that he said was “a play we could have completed.” It would have gotten the Cubs out of the inning. But second baseman Nick Madrigal’s throw to shortstop Miles Mastrobuoni was high, and they only threw out the lead runner.
With a runner on first in the first inning, Steele threw a fastball low and inside to Edward Olivares. He hit a line drive that cleared the left-field wall to put the Pirates up 2-0.
Then in the fourth, Gonzales tacked on his solo blast. It still would’ve been a homer at 24 other ballparks, according to Statcast. But the Pirates’ home stadium, PNC Park, was among those in which the fly ball would have fallen short of the wall.
On Steele’s way to giving up two more runs before exiting with two outs in the sixth, the Pirates tagged him for two doubles. But he also ran into some bad luck. He missed a pickoff by inches, celebrating before the umpire called the runner safe. And right fielder Seiya Suzuki missed a fly ball with a runner on third.
Facing the Pirates’ lineup for the second time in a week added an interesting wrinkle to Steele’s outing.
“Who gets the advantage?” Counsell said. “Execution becomes really important. . . . It’s a little more of a cat-and-mouse game.”
The Cubs’ offense, also facing Pirates starter Jared Jones for the second time in a week, scored early on a solo homer by Ian Happ in the second inning. And the Cubs continued to chip away at the Pirates’ lead with an RBI single by Madrigal in the fourth inning and an RBI double by Cody Bellinger in the fifth.
The Cubs cut the Pirates’ lead to one run on a sacrifice fly by Christopher Morel in the eighth inning. But that’s as close as they’d get.
