WEST SACRAMENTO – After another early exit in his latest start, Pirates pitcher Jared Jones was asked if he had to temper his expectations for the 2026 season after sitting out all of 2025 while recovering from right elbow surgery.
The question alone seemed almost laughable to the Bucs’ 24-year-old right-hander, who has only one win in his first four appearances this season.
“That’s just an excuse, and a pretty bad one if I’m being honest,” Jones said after Monday’s 11-2 loss to the Athletics in the Pirates’ first trip to Sutter Health Park. “I’m in the Major Leagues and I’m out here to win baseball games. I haven’t been doing that.”
It has indeed been a rough season for Jones.
There have been times when he’s looked very close to his former self, and there have been times when he’s flat-out gotten lit up.
Monday’s game against the A’s featured a little bit of both.
The A’s had Jones on the ropes after beginning the first inning with three consecutive singles. The Pirates’ pitcher shut the uprising down quickly, blowing third-strike fastballs past Jacob Wilson (99 mph), Carlos Cortes (100.7 mph) and Zack Gelof (99.5 mph).
“He’s got strikeout stuff. We knew that going into tonight,” A’s manager Mark Kotsay said. “We wanted to get his pitch count up right away. We made him work. Even though we weren’t successful scoring runs in the first inning, our guys still took good at-bats and grinded and got him out of the game."
After giving up three runs in the second – two on Nick Kurtz’s 17th home run of the season – Jones bounced back and got Shea Langeliers to foul out before striking out Tyler Soderstrom on a 94.1 mph changeup.
Jones leaned on the changeup more frequently because of a lack of action on his slider.
“Didn’t seem as sharp as his last outing,” Pirates manager Don Kelly said of Jones’ slider. “I thought the last outing, it was sharper. Fastball velo was there, seemed like the ball was coming out pretty well. Just didn’t have the breaking ball today.”
When he was on, Jones’ fastball was electric, generating five swing-and-misses and five called strikes with it.
The final numbers for Jones – four innings, eight hits, five runs – are certainly not the desired results, but he had been pitching better in his previous outings. He had allowed two runs combined over two abbreviated starts in June before getting knocked around a bit by the A’s.
Still, the memory of what Jones was able to do in that first inning is something he can build off of.
“Pretty cool inning for me,” he said. “Obviously a lot of adversity going, three straight hits, but I was pretty happy to get out of the first one.”