This one didn't play out anywhere close to form. Arizona jumped on Chandler and Pittsburgh's defense early, piling up runs across the first four innings while the Pirates' offense went completely dark for six straight frames.
Then Pittsburgh remembered how it's been winning games lately. The Pirates scored 3 in the 8th, 3 more in the 9th, and 1 in the 10th to erase the entire deficit and drag this thing into extra innings, riding the same never-say-die energy that produced Brandon Lowe's walk-off the night before. Arizona's pen, which had already blown a couple of late leads this week, looked shaky doing it again. But the Diamondbacks found one more run in the 12th and made it stand, escaping with an 8-7 win.
It's the kind of game that decides tiebreakers in September. Arizona snapped a 3-game skid in the ugliest, most stressful way possible, while Pittsburgh's encouraging 2-game winning streak gets stopped cold by a bullpen letdown of its own. With both teams sitting at 55-52 and jockeying for the same Wild Card slot, a 12-inning slugfest like this one is exactly the type of game that gets remembered when the standings get sorted out in October.