Joey Bart did not wait for Mitch Keller to figure it out on his own Thursday afternoon at Chase Field. Between innings, the Pirates catcher pulled Keller aside and challenged him after a rough start against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Keller, who fell behind on eight of the first 13 batters he faced, steadied from there and finished with six-plus innings, two earned runs, four hits, two walks and four strikeouts on 84 pitches. Adrian Del Castillo drove in a run with an RBI single in the first inning, and Corbin Carroll added a solo home run in the third before Keller settled in.
Bart said afterward that he told Keller, “Let’s go. Let’s do better,” adding that he said it “in a nice way.” The exchange came after Keller’s first three innings were described as pretty sporadic, but it seemed to work. From the fourth through the sixth innings, he retired nine consecutive Diamondbacks hitters and gave Pittsburgh a much cleaner stretch than the game had opened with.
That turnaround mattered because Keller’s early trouble had put the Pirates in a quick hole, and the pressure only increased once Arizona had already put runs on the board. Bart’s intervention did not change Keller’s mechanics so much as his edge, giving him a jolt of confidence at the moment he needed it most.
Don Kelly removed Keller after a leadoff single in the seventh inning, closing the book on an outing that began shakily and ended as a recovery. For Pittsburgh, the takeaway was less about the first three innings than the way Keller answered them: he found enough to turn a messy start into something the Pirates could live with.
