Pirates’ big five‑run inning

The game stayed tight for five innings, the way a cold April game often does. Paul Skenes gave the Padres almost nothing, Nick Pivetta kept the Pirates quiet for four innings, and Pittsburgh carried only a 2-0 lead into the eighth. Then the inning that turned a tense game into a 7-1 win arrived all at once: Nick Gonzales opened the frame with a two-run single, Konnor Griffin followed with a line-drive single to center that brought home two more, and the Pirates suddenly had room to breathe instead of one mistake away from trouble (apnews.com, cbssports.com, espn.com). Griffin’s hit was the kind that looks simple in a box score and louder in real time. By the time he came up in the eighth, he had already singled in the fifth and scored from first on Oneil Cruz’s two-run double down the left-field line. His second hit, a sharp ball to center, pushed the lead from 4-1 to 6-1 and finished the game’s decisive swing. For a 19-year-old shortstop who made his major-league debut only on April 3, it was another small piece of evidence that the Pirates are not treating him like a curiosity or a future project. They are using him now, in leverage now, and getting runs from him now (cbssports.com, mlb.com, mlb.com). The inning worked because Pittsburgh stacked hard contact instead of waiting for one heroic swing. Cruz had already done damage in the fifth with a two-run double off Pivetta. In the eighth, the Pirates kept the line moving, forced San Diego to defend multiple balls in play, and made the Padres pay for an error-filled night. That is what a five-run inning usually is in practice: not one explosion, but a chain reaction. A single becomes pressure. Pressure becomes a rushed throw or a bad pitch. One baserunner becomes three, and then the scoreboard changes faster than the eye does (cbssports.com, espn.com, apnews.com). That outburst also landed in the middle of a full Tuesday slate across the majors. MLB’s scoreboard listed 15 games on April 7, one of those early-season nights when every fan base can talk itself into patterns. Most of those patterns are flimsy in the season’s second week. A lineup can look dead for three days and dangerous on the fourth. Still, teams notice the shape of their runs, not just the total. Pittsburgh got two in the fifth and five in the eighth, and both rallies came from hitters passing the job to the next hitter instead of trying to end the game alone (mlb.com, cbssports.com). Skenes gave the inning its stage by holding San Diego hitless until the sixth. He struck out six, walked two, and left to an ovation after 6 1/3 innings, with the Pirates on their way to a sixth win in seven games. Griffin, born in 2006 and drafted ninth overall in 2024, finished with the second and third hits of his major-league career. In a game that began as a duel and ended as a rout, the cleanest image was that eighth-inning single to center, two runners crossing, and a lead that no longer looked fragile (apnews.com, triblive.com, mlb.com).