Roansy Contreras with solid debut in Bucs’ loss

It was a tale of two Contrerases Wednesday night at PNC Park.

Pirates rookie right-hander Roansy Contreras started and pitched three scoreless innings in his major league debut, but Willson Contreras collected three RBIs to lead the Chicago Cubs to a 3-2 victory over the Bucs, evening their three-game set at one game each.

Roansy Contreras faced 12 batters in his three innings of work and threw a total of 46 pitches, 29 of which were strikes.

He struck out four and walked one in addition to giving up three hits.

Contreras gave up a base hit to the first hitter he faced in the game, Rafael Ortega, and after getting Frank Schwindel to fly out to center, he yielded another base hit to Willson Contreras.

But Roansy Contreras regrouped, striking out Ian Happ and getting Matt Duffy to hit into a fielder’s choice to end the inning.

Contreras had trouble finding the strike zone at the outset of the second inning, walking leadoff batter Nick Martini on four pitches and then going 2-0 on David Bote. But he rebounded to strike out Bote, and after Martini was caught stealing, Contreras caught Sergio Alcantara looking for his third strikeout of the game.

In Contreras’ final inning of work, he struck out Kyle Hendricks, got Ortega to fly out to left and after giving up a double to Schwindel, he got Willson Contreras to ground out to third.

The Cubs took a 1-0 lead in the top of the fifth on Willson Contreras’ sacrifice fly, but the Pirates moved in front 2-1 in the sixth on Bryan Reynolds’ RBI triple and Kevin Newman’s sacrifice fly.

But that lead evaporated in the seventh when Willson Contreras delivered a two-out double to right that scored a pair of runs and gave the Cubs a 3-2 advantage.

NOTES – To make room for Contreras on the 28-man roster, the Pirates placed third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes on the injured list with left wrist soreness, ending his season.

According to Pirates.com, Todd Tomczyk, the club’s director of sports medicine, said the soreness wasn’t related to an earlier wrist issue that caused Hayes to miss most of the first two months of the season.

“It’s a different location on his wrist,” Tomczyk said. “It’s a different sensation.

“In April, he was dealing more with pain and true discomfort. Here, this is more general wrist soreness. We’re working through what his availability is both short and long term.”

Tomczyk said the soreness Hayes is feeling at the moment is not related to any bone or tendon, which he called “encouraging” news.

Haye, a Gold Glove caliber defensive player, finished with a .257 batting average and a .689 OPS in 96 games. He homered six times and drove in 38 runs in 396 plate appearances.