The Pirates beat the Red Sox 8-3 on Sunday, and they did it the hard way: sit through two and a half hours of rain, come back out, and put up a crooked number anyway. Bryan Reynolds, Brandon Lowe and Nick Yorke each drove in two. That is six of the eight runs from three guys, which is about as balanced as a blowout gets.
Rain delays are their own little sport. Nobody trains for them. You get loose, you get cold, you get loose again, and the team that handles the second warmup better usually wins the last six innings. Sunday, that was Pittsburgh.
How did the Pirates beat the Red Sox 8-3?
The run distribution tells the story better than any adjective I could hang on it.
| Pirate | RBI | Share of the 8 runs |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Reynolds | 2 | 25% |
| Brandon Lowe | 2 | 25% |
| Nick Yorke | 2 | 25% |
| Rest of the lineup | 2 | 25% |
That is the shape of a good offensive day for a club that has spent a lot of recent summers waiting on one man to carry it. Three separate two-RBI games out of the same lineup means Boston never got to pitch around anybody. You handle Reynolds, Lowe hurts you. You handle Lowe, the kid hurts you.
About the kid. Nick Yorke was a Red Sox first-round pick, and Boston sent him to Pittsburgh in a deadline deal a couple of summers back for a young arm. Nothing sinister about it, that is how the trade market works, and Boston got a pitcher it wanted. But there is no version of baseball where a former first-rounder driving in two against the club that drafted him is just another line in the box score. Somebody in that dugout noticed. That is a tell about how these afternoons get remembered.
Reynolds, meanwhile, remains the through line. He arrived in the McCutchen trade back in 2018 and he has outlasted about four different eras of Pirates baseball since. Guy just keeps hitting.
What the rain delay actually costs a team
I do not have the full pitching lines in front of me, so I am not going to pretend to know exactly who got pulled when the tarp came out. What I do know from twenty-odd years of watching this happen: a delay past ninety minutes almost never returns a starter to the mound. Both managers likely burned relievers they had penciled in for later in the week, and both clubs are back on the field within about twenty-four hours.
checked the almanac: the most famous rain interruption in the sport's modern history is Game 5 of the 2008 World Series in Philadelphia, suspended in the middle of the sixth and not finished for another two days. baseball is the only game that will just stop and wait for the sky. one beat of wonder for that, then back to work.
What comes next for the Pirates and Red Sox
Pittsburgh hosts Detroit on Monday night at 7:06 ET. Boston hosts Arizona at 7:11 ET. Both clubs are running out of a bullpen that got scrambled by a tarp, which is the least glamorous storyline in sports and one of the most reliably decisive.
For Pittsburgh, the thing worth tracking is whether this is a lineup shape or a nice Sunday. A middle of the order that produces from three spots instead of one changes how the rest of a season feels, even in mid-August, even for a club playing for next year. For Boston, the question is simpler and more urgent: they got beat after a long wait, on the road, by a team with less to play for. Those are the games that tell you something about a roster's stomach.
I am watching two things Monday night. Who Pittsburgh sends out of the pen in the seventh, and whether Yorke is in the lineup again. Everyday at-bats for a 24-year-old in August is how you find out what you have in April.
