CHICAGO — Two pitches turned Nick Pivetta’s dominant start into a loss on Tuesday afternoon.
And truth be told, he only wanted one of them back: Seiya Suzuki’s fifth-inning homer on a 2-1, middle-in fastball for a 424-foot shot to tie the game.
As for the 2-2 fastball above the zone that Carson Kelly hit over the wall in left, “that’s a head-scratcher,” Pivetta said after the Padres’ 3-1 loss to the Cubs in Game 1 of the NL Wild Card Series.
“It’s a hats-off-to-him kind of situation,” Pivetta said. “He took a really interesting swing on the fastball before that, on the down-and-away (pitch). So I just figured attack him again with the fastball. He was able to put a good swing on it.”
Pivetta allowed just one other hit, a first-inning single that he stranded with two punchouts. After the back-to-back homers in the fifth, Pivetta struck out the next three batters to get to nine strikeouts, a postseason high for him and one shy of tying the season-high 10 he reached three times in this breakout season.
And yet he somehow managed to take the loss.
“It’s part of baseball; I gave up three hits today,” Pivetta said. “For me, it’s this is the baseball park that we’re in — it’s a day game in Chicago — but I need to execute, especially the Seiya pitch.
“I need to execute that pitch a little bit better.”
The key to Pivetta’s success on Tuesday — the homers aside — was treating the Game 1 start like any other start he had on the way to penning a career-low 2.87 ERA.
“Yeah, allowed my adrenaline to take over,” Pivetta said. “ … I had a good season, so I just kind of relied on that, relied on what I’d done, and just focused on attacking hitters.”
Clearly. Pivetta did not walk a batter, had just three three-ball counts and had retired 11 in a row when Suzuki homered off a four-seamer to start the fifth inning.
Perhaps it should not have been a surprise that Kelly got to a fastball, too — eventually — as 72% of Pivetta’s offerings on Tuesday were either a four-seamer or a sinker.
The curveball was Pivetta’s primary secondary pitch in the regular season (22.4% compared to 46% on four-seamers), but Pivetta threw just nine curves (11%) against a team that had been susceptible to hard stuff this season.
“I think it’s more of just a game plan,” Pivetta said. “I just kind of continue to throw pitches in the strike zone, attack with my heater and realize that was a strength of mine today. And I’m not usually going to stray away from that.”
A familiar place
Before the White Sox put him on the trade block before the 2024 season, before the Padres dangled him this summer before ultimately keeping him, it was the Cubs who got Dylan Cease used to trade rumors.
A sixth-round pick of the Cubs in 2014, Cease was at low Single-A South Bend in 2017 when he and outfielder Eloy Jimenez were included in the package that sent left-hander Jose Quintana across town to the Cubs.
It wasn’t a shock. In fact, there was enough smoke that he and his teammates joked that he was on the move, much like the way Michael King and Cease joked about the scenarios early this year.
“I kept getting pushed back and I remember that was kind of like a running joke everyone on the team was having,” Cease recalled. “But I didn’t think it was imminent. We were kind of just messing around with it. But things like that happen in baseball.”
Díaz left off roster
The Padres opened the postseason with three catchers on their NL Wild Card Series roster. None of them were Elias Díaz, who tweaked his left oblique on a swing on Saturday and had not improved enough for him catch Nick Pivetta on Tuesday.
So Freddy Fermín caught Pivetta for the first time this season and Luis Campusano and Martín Maldonado were added as back-up catchers, although Campusano is “more of a bat if we need something at some point,” manager Mike Shildt said.
As far as Díaz, the Padres have enough hope for a return later this postseason that they decided against pushing him for this series.
“Once we talked with medical and even spoke with Elias, he was pretty honest — disappointed — but honest and said, ‘Listen, I don’t know if I can really go and trust it,’” Shildt said. “We know we’re at a point where he is with what he’s dealing with that he could really be lost for the rest of the year. But we’re also at a point where if he got some rest, there’s optimism he could be OK moving forward, so that’s the route we took.”
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