Pirates Rookie Battled Through Strong Start Despite ‘Nothing’ Feeling Good

With all the attention on phenom Paul Skenes and the recently recalled Bubba Chandler, Braxton Ashcraft has quietly flourished in the Pittsburgh Pirates’ rotation.

Ashcraft allowed one run over a career-high 5 2/3 innings in Thursday’s 4-1 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. The 25-year-old rookie has now yielded three runs in four starts since moving from the bullpen earlier this month.

Ashcraft had a relatively clean outing at St. Louis, amassing five strikeouts to one walk while relinquishing four hits. Yet the right-hander told reporters after the game, per SportsNet Pittsburgh on X, that he wasn’t operating with his sharpest stuff.

“Nothing,” Ashcraft said when asked what felt good on the mound. “It was a grind.”

Despite that assessment, Ashcraft garnered 11 swinging strikes on his 73 pitches and allowed just one extra-base hit, an Ivan Herrera double in the bottom of the third. He left the game with a 1-1 tie before the Cardinals scored three go-ahead runs in the seventh.

“The starts that you feel good, you go out and you expect to have success,” Ashcraft said. “That’s not saying that any outing that you have, you don’t expect to have success. But the times where you may not have your best stuff, which is hardly ever, that’s what baseball is about. That’s what being a pitcher is about, and that’s what pitching for a long time in the big leagues is about. … So being able to go out and still go 5 2/3 [innings] and be relatively efficient and give myself a chance to record a quality start, it’s a good step in the right direction.”

Thursday marked the first time Ashcraft recorded an out beyond the fifth inning in his major league career. He last worked into the sixth at Triple-A Indianapolis on May 21, so Ashcraft was happy to pitch deeper into the game and finally face batters a third time through the order.

“It was nice to get into the sixth inning again,” Ashcraft said. “I think it’s been five months since I’ve done that, so being able to do that and still maintain what stuff I did have today and get some quick outs aside from I guess the first hitter, it’s good. There’s a lot of good to take from today.”

If Pittsburgh’s current rotation holds, Ashcraft will face his steepest test as a starter when pitching against the Los Angeles Dodgers next week.

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