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CHICAGO -- Wow, what was that?
Neil Walker went 4 for 5 with a home run, double and four RBIs as the Pirates produced an out-of-left-field 14-7 clobbering of the Chicago Cubs Tuesday night at Wrigley Field, in the process stopping some sizable streaks:
• A 14-game road losing streak, the previous victory outside Pittsburgh having come July 28 in Denver.
• A four-game overall losing streak, those comprising the first four games of this trip that concludes today.
• An 11-start winless streak for Jeff Karstens, whose six quiet innings brought his first W since June 19.
• A streak of 204 innings without scoring more than three runs, dating back to Aug. 16, this ending with a four-run first.
Game: Pirates vs. Chicago Cubs, 2:20 p.m., Wrigley Field.
TV, radio: FSN Pittsburgh, WPGB-FM (104.7).
Pitching: RHP James McDonald (2-4, 5.65) vs. LHP Tom Gorzelanny (7-8, 3.98).
Key matchup: In seven appearances against his original team, Gorzelanny is 1-0 with a 3.56 ERA and .286 opponents' batting average.
Of note: The Pirates are 18-23 when the opponent starts a left-hander. Andrew McCutchen fares the best against lefties, with a .311 average.
Add to that the whiplash conversion from a string of listlessness -- lowlighted the previous night with a 14-2 loss to these same Cubs -- into an energetic display that included several defensive gems by Ronny Cedeno and Pedro Alvarez, and the whole scene could not have been much more satisfying for the Pirates.
"A lot of fun," Walker called it.
"Felt pretty good," center fielder Andrew McCutchen said. "We hit some balls hard, found some holes, hit some out ... things were actually going our way."
Explanations?
"We just swung the bats well," manager John Russell said. "Everything looks good when you score a lot of runs."
He noted that most of the damage was done to Chicago starter Ryan Dempster, who entered 12-8 with a 3.42 ERA but was rocked for seven runs in three innings.
"The guys came out against a guy who's been pitching really well and jumped on him," Russell continued. "What I liked was that we kept adding on, kept up the pressure."
The Pirates went ahead, 9-0, in the fourth -- same lead the Cubs had at the same point Monday -- then added two each in the sixth and seventh for a 14-2 lead.
The offense was highlighted by ... well, by having more than one or two highlights: Garrett Jones hit his 20th home run, a two-run shot, and had three RBIs. Jose Tabata went 3 for 5 with a triple and two RBIs. McCutchen, climbing out of a rare slump, also went 3 for 5 with a double, walk, two RBIs and a steal. Cedeno had a two-run double. And Alvarez, even amid four strikeouts, had an RBI double.
Still, Walker stood out.
He singled in his first at-bat and eventually scored. After a strikeout in the second, he opened the fourth with a single, followed immediately by Jones' shot above the center-field ivy. He followed Tabata's leadoff single in the sixth with a two-run shot of his own. Finally, he lined a two-run double to left-center in the seventh.
That raised Walker's RBI total to 48 in just 80 games, his average up to .305. The latter is due to outstanding consistency, including at least one hit in 26 of his past 34 games, multiple hits in nine of those.
"It's just trust," Walker said. "It's just believing in what I'm doing at the plate, knowing that what I'm doing is correct."
And the three home runs in the past four games?
"I'm going up there with the attitude of just putting the ball in play. I'm not trying to hit home runs. Sometimes, you just feel like you can put the foot down and swing like that. I wish I could explain it."
Walker did proceed to credit hitting coach Don Long for "getting me prepared for pitchers I've never seen before."
The 14 runs represented the Pirates' second-most this season, behind the 15-3 rout of the Milwaukee Brewers July 21, and the most on the road since May 31, 2008, a 14-4 victory in St. Louis. The latter is quite some breakout for a team that had lost 38 of its previous 42 on the road.
Karstens bounced back from arm fatigue that prompted management to skip his turn last week, holding Chicago to two runs and four hits, striking out six, all in a fairly efficient 87 pitches.
"Jeff was good," Russell said. "You could see he had a chance to rebound and come back strong."
The arm, anyway."I did feel strong, but I didn't have my legs under me after the second inning," Karstens said. "Maybe it was sugar or something. I just gutted it out."
Sean Gallagher gave up five Chicago runs in late relief.
For all the sorry statistics so easily accumulated over a 44-88 season, check out this oddity: The Pirates now are 10-4 against the Cubs, accounting for 22.7 percent of their victory total.
According to the Elias Sports Bureau, that is the highest such percentage in Major League Baseball since the 2008 Washington Nationals won 12 of their 59, or 20.3 percent, against the Atlanta Braves. It is the highest for the Pirates since 2002, when they won 15 of their 72 against Milwaukee.
Colin Dunlap's blog on the Pirates is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.
