PHOENIX -- Josh Collmenter ran the Arizona Diamondbacks' streak of quality starts to eight on Friday. If only the D-backs had not run up against a starter who has not lost since last year.
Pittsburgh right-hander Gerrit Cole is unbeaten since Sept. 7, 2014, after a 4-1 victory over the D-backs at Chase Field. Cole has won his last seven decisions, three this season, a streak that only Zack Greinke can match in that time frame. The D-backs have seen Greinke in action this year, too.
Cole threw first-pitch strikes to 27 of the 32 batters he faced, putting the D-backs' hitters in a tough spot most of the night. They could either take a pitch and fall behind in the count, or attack his well-positioned 95-96 mph fastball that he complements with a 78-mph curve. The D-backs got seven hits in 7 2/3 innings, but they failed to string enough together to keep a rally going against Cole, the first player taken in the 2011 draft.
"He is a No. 1 pitcher," D-backs manager Chip Hale said.
"He has been groomed that way since he came out of college. He controlled the zone and threw his fastball where he wanted to. We took a lot of pitches early in the count when he got ahead. He was hitting the inside corner, also. Usually his ball on the inside corner will run in. He was on tonight."
Collmenter gave up three runs in the first two innings, and Cole had something to do with that, too, although not quite in the way Collmenter tormented San Francisco with his three singles and an RBI in a 9-0 shutout a week ago.
Cole's two-out single followed a single by Jordy Mercer in the second inning, and Josh Harrison drove both in with a two-run double to right-center for a 3-0 lead, all the runs Cole would need. He struck out seven and walked two.
The D-backs bunched three singles in the sixth inning when they scored their only run. Paul Goldschmidt singled with one out and Yasmany Tomas singled with two out to put runners on first and second. Goldschmidt scored from second on Chris Owings' infield single, when Neil Walker stopped the ball but could not get much on his throw home. Goldschmidt beat it with a hook slide.
Goldschmidt had a hit and a walk. Ender Inciarte had two hits.
"He used his fastball really well but then mixed it up with his other three pitches," Goldschmidt said of Cole.
"The main thing was establishing his fastball on the both sides of the plate. He was throwing a lot of strikes. If we were patient, he was throwing a lot of first-pitch strikes and guys were behind in the count. As hard as he throws it and with the good off-speed stuff he has, it is hard to recover from that."
Collmenter needed some help from Oliver Perez and Brad Ziegler in the seventh inning. Collmenter gave up a leadoff double to Starling Marte before being replaced by Perez, who entered to face left-handed hitting Pedro Alvarez. The Pirates brought in Corey Hart, but it did not matter.
Perez stuck out Hart before yielding to Ziegler, who got a short fly to center for the second out. He intentionally walked Mercer before getting Cole to ground out to Tomas, making his second start at third base.
The approach that worked so well for Cole was Collmenter's undoing, he said.
"Fastball command," Collmenter said. "I was all over the place the first couple of innings. I was throwing, not pitching. A couple of pitches away from getting out of it, but I had a bad pitch to Harrison and that was probably the difference in the ballgame."
Harrison was thrown out attempting to stretch his hit into a triple, and Collmenter retired the next 12 the faced before Marte's double in the seventh.
"The biggest thing is go out there and be a team player, give your team a chance to win," Collmenter said. "You don't want to tax the bullpen and get out of there in just a couple of innings. You just continue to go out there and usually find a groove. It is easier if you can start from pitch one but sometimes it is not until the third or fourth inning."
The Pirates used a radical shift against left-handed hitting Ender Inciarte, putting three infielders on the first base side of second in his first three at-bats, even against power pitcher Gerrit Cole, who was still hitting 96 mph in the seventh inning. It did not really work. Inciarte singled just to the shortstop side of second base in the third inning and slapped a single over the third baseman's head in the seventh.
253 -- Brad Ziegler tied Jose Valverde for the most appearances in franchise history when he took the mound in the seventh inning.
* 3B Yasmany Tomas had his first major league walk and his first major league stolen base in a span of two pitches in the eighth inning. After drawing an eight-pitch walk to knock Pirates starter Gerrit Cole out of the game, Tomas took off for second and slid in safely when reliever Jared Hughes seemed to lose track of him after an 0-1 pitch to Chris Owings. Tomas handled two chances while playing the full nine innings. Manager Chip Hale said he started Tomas because he liked the potential of a power-on-power matchup, inasmuch as Tomas hit Johnny Cueto hard late in spring training. Tomas did single off Cole to the opposite field. With Josh Collmenter on the mound, there also were likely to be more fly balls than grounders, although that did not bear out. The D-backs got 14 outs on the ground.
* D-backs starting pitchers have a 2.17 ERA in the last eight games, all quality starts, their first such streak since July 30-Aug. 7, 2012, when Josh Collmenter, Patrick Corbin, Wade Miley and Ian Kennedy were in the rotation. The D-backs have allowed one home run in the last eight games.
* The Pirates scored all their runs with two outs, the most bothersome being when Evan Marshall walked Andrew McCutchen with two outs in the eighth inning and gave up Neil Walker's double to right-center. "That one kind of hurt us because we had just scored a run and wanted a shut-down," Hale said.
Within the flurry of Josh Hamilton news Friday, a report surfaced that Hamilton told the Los Angeles Angels that he would not accept a trade to Arizona. He was not the only one. The D-backs were never involved in any talks about Hamilton, according to a highly placed source, and never would have been, no matter how much money the Angels would have sent along. Too much risk involved.
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