Game Log: June 15, 2026 @ Athletics

	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	R	H	E
PIT	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	2	8	1
ATH	0	3	0	2	1	0	5	0	x	11	15	1

There is no clever way to spin an 11-2 loss, so I won’t waste your time trying. The Pirates went out to Sacramento and got run out of the building in game 1 by an Athletics team that needed about three innings to decide it.

Jones got the start and lasted four. In that time he gave up five runs and two homers, a two-run shot to Nick Kurtz in the second and another two-run shot from Jeff McNeil in the fourth. They were down 5-1 before the lineup had really done anything, which is a sentence I feel I’ve written far too many times.

Then Mlodzinski came on and poured gas on it. The seventh inning was the backbreaker, a five-run mess that a Brandon Lowe error helped crack open and Kurtz finished things off with his second homer of the night. Kurtz ended up with two home runs and five RBI. McNeil had three hits and four RBI of his own. The Pirates were simply not in the game at any point.

The offense managed eight hits, two runs, and went one-for-seven with runners in scoring position, and nine men left on base. Endy Rodríguez was the lone bright spot, three-for-three with a solo homer in the eighth that made the final look one run less embarrassing than it felt. Jake Mangum knocked in the other one on a very Jake Mangum-like bloop single earlier in the game. That was the whole night.

This was another exhausting watch as a fan. The bullpen is still very much an issue. Moving Mlodzinski solves nothing when it’s this prescriptive that he is going to piggyback Jared Jones’ starts. Unfortunately, the offense is still off right now. The Pirates need more from Horwitz, Lowe, and O’Hearn while Cruz is out. To have the bullpen this bad with the main offensive contributors slumping is not ideal in the middle of June.

Seems fitting that this came at the hands of the A’s, another team sitting right around .500 with us, in a half-empty park in Sacramento. Nobody’s year ends on June 15th, I know that. But you sit through enough of these and you stop waiting for the part where it gets better. On to the next one.